Back in school I learned about the Saxon genitive, but I see it's rarely used in both written and spoken English. Is it true? Should I avoid to use it? It seems to me that it's more common when I'm talking about things belonging to someone.
Example 1: "This is Joe's car", not "This is the car of Joe"
Example 2: "This matches our company values", not "This matches the values of our company"
Is my interpretation correct? Is there any other nuance I'm not getting? Something like one being more formal or one being more commonly used in spoken language
Best Answer
Good discussions of this are here and here. I'd like to touch on a few topics
Note that "company values" is ok. The third option isn't more formal in terms of English register, it's just stylistically different. Some people might consider it more formal though. Also, note:
Some prescriptivists might object to the second sentence above since a table isn't a person. I recall being taught this same rule at least once. But the people over at https://english.stackexchange.com have addressed this, mostly debunking it. Still, if your teacher or boss or editor doesn't like it, stick with what they say. Also, my own take on this is American English.