{"id":1783,"date":"2015-02-10T16:23:30","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T22:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=1783"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:55:48","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:55:48","slug":"rules-policies-and-judgment-calls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/apostrophes\/rules-policies-and-judgment-calls\/","title":{"rendered":"Rules, Policies, and Judgment Calls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Readers seemed to enjoy \u201cAre Two\u00a0<em>r<\/em>\u2019s One Too Many?\u201d our column about the pronunciation of\u00a0<em>February<\/em>. But we also received a few emails like this one: \u201cWhy on earth is there an apostrophe in the title??\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We understand the reader\u2019s concern. Starting in grade school, English teachers rail against sentences like \u201cBanana\u2019s make good snack\u2019s.\u201d Students learn early on that only careless or clueless writers use apostrophes\u00a0to pluralize nouns.<\/p>\n<p>However, there are certain exceptions. When a rule leads to perplexity rather than clarity, writers and editors will make adjustments. For instance, the use of apostrophes strikes us as the simplest and most practical way to pluralize\u00a0<em>is<\/em> and\u00a0<em>was<\/em>\u00a0in a sentence like\u00a0<em>Jones uses too many is\u2019s and was\u2019s<\/em>. You may feel you have a better solution, but the\u00a0<em>is\u2019s and was\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0solution is not wrong. It is endorsed by many reputable language authorities.<\/p>\n<p>These days, initialisms like\u00a0<em>TV<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0<em>RSVP<\/em>\u00a0are made plural simply by adding a lowercase\u00a0<em>s<\/em>\u00a0without an apostrophe:\u00a0<em>TVs<\/em>,\u00a0<em>RSVPs<\/em>. But to pluralize abbreviations that end in\u00a0<em>S<\/em>, we advise using an apostrophe:\u00a0<em>They sent out two SOS\u2019s<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine the confusion if you wrote\u00a0<em>My a\u2019s look like u\u2019s<\/em> without apostrophes. Readers would see\u00a0<em>as<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>us<\/em>, and feel lost.<\/p>\n<p>This brings us back to our title and the phrase \u201ctwo\u00a0<em>r<\/em>\u2019s.\u201d\u00a0<em>The\u00a0Chicago Manual of Style<\/em>\u00a0(<em>CMOS<\/em>)\u00a0endorses \u201cMind your p\u2019s and q\u2019s.\u201d The\u00a0<em>Practical English Handbook<\/em> by Floyd C. Watkins, William B. Dillingham, et al., sanctions \u201cfour\u00a0<em>c<\/em>\u2019s,\u201d but the book also accepts \u201cfour\u00a0<em>c<\/em>s,\u201d presumably because the difference between\u00a0<em>c<\/em> in italics and s in roman typeface is sufficient for attentive readers.<\/p>\n<p>There is no definitive rule for using apostrophes (or not) to form plurals in special cases like these. For many decades\u00a0<em>The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0wrote\u00a0<em>the 1920\u2019s<\/em>. Then the paper changed its policy in late 2012, and now writes <em>the 1920s<\/em>\u00a0like most of the rest of us. And though\u00a0<em>CMOS<\/em>\u00a0recommends \u201cp\u2019s and q\u2019s,\u201d it prefers\u00a0<em>yeses and nos<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0<em>yes\u2019s and no\u2019s<\/em>. One wonders if\u00a0<em>CMOS<\/em> would prefer\u00a0<em>ises and wases<\/em>\u00a0to <em>is\u2019s and was\u2019s<\/em>\u2014because to us,\u00a0<em>ises and wases<\/em>\u00a0is too obscure to be a practical solution.<\/p>\n<p>So to avoid similar confusion, we went with \u201cTwo\u00a0<em>r<\/em>\u2019s\u201d and not \u201cTwo\u00a0<em>r<\/em>s\u201d in our title. We didn\u2019t feel comfortable signing off on something that looked like a typo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Readers seemed to enjoy \u201cAre Two\u00a0r\u2019s One Too Many?\u201d our column about the pronunciation of\u00a0February. But we also received a few emails like this one: \u201cWhy on earth is there an apostrophe in the title??\u201d We understand the reader\u2019s concern. Starting in grade school, English teachers rail against sentences like \u201cBanana\u2019s make good snack\u2019s.\u201d Students [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,16,21,34,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbreviations","category-apostrophes","category-capitalization","category-possessives","category-singular-vs-plural"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}