On the recent paucity of posting

Dear all,

It is the start of a new school year, and between my attempts to establish residency (I love the state of California and wish to make it my permanent home, in case any of the people in charge of residency read this blog), to learn to teach, and to understand Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and other things involving more math than I’ve seen since I finished my undergrad thesis, I have had precious little time to spend on issues of grammar. So I apologize, but for the next few months my posting rate will be notably smaller. This should already have been evident by the delay between installments V and VI in Preposterous Apostrophes. And heck, now I’m out of apostrophe-related issues to talk about.

This is where you come in, dear readers. At the end of the day, I sometimes have the energy to write about grammar but not the energy to come up with a topic to write about. Thus I am soliciting suggestions for topics you’d like to see discussed and questions you’d like to have answered about grammar or linguistics in general. Any ideas are welcome; just tack them onto the comments for this post or any other, and I’ll try to address them when the mood strikes me. It’s not a hard task I put before you. Everyone has their little grammar peeves. Now you can find out how justified they are! It’ll be loads of fun! I eagerly await.

Preposterous Apostrophes VI: A Wrinkle

To hear most people tell it, writing something like I like you’re coat is pretty similar to writing Say what you will about the Fascists, but at least Mussolini got the trains running on time. Namely, it marks you as an idiot with only a rudimentary understanding of the English language (or Italian history in the second sentence). “There are very simple, clear-cut rules about which your/you’re is used where!” cry the grammarians, and I admit that in the past I have cried with them. But if writing the Preposterous Apostrophes series has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is clear-cut when apostrophes are involved. So why do people get so confused between possessive pronouns and contractions (or in the case of they’re/their/there, pronouns, contractions, and locatives)?

I think the problem is best seen in the its/it’s distinction. The former is a possessive pronoun, the latter a contraction. People get awfully riled up about this confusion, but just try to tell me it’s not a reasonable mistake to make. It is singular, it ends in a consonant that sounds nothing like an s, and it’s sure noun-like. Well, nouns that don’t end in s-like sounds always get ’s to make their possessives, so why shouldn’t it be it’s? The answer is that, due to the vagaries of English, pronouns are not treated like nouns when possessives are formed, silly! Of course, there are situations where it’s would be a proper possessive, because this is English and nothing should be easy about it:

(1) Get Over It’s lack of commercial success despite Sisqo’s starring role remains a mystery.
(2) The IT’S-IT’s popularity is limited off the West Coast, but it shouldn’t be.
(3) Cousin Itt’s hair is the inspiration for my new hairstyle.

Now, in both of these cases, it is a noun, while in its situations, it is a pronoun. One could argue that in these sentences the ’s is not attaching directly to it (or Itt), but rather to a phrase that ends in it. But I think that in cases where one can refer directly to it as a noun, it’s is far better than its:

(4) Upon seeing the ghost, Mr. Czolgosz shouted, “It… it… it… it’s a ghost!” It’s repetition in his stammered statement underscored his fear.

(Of course, any reasonable speaker of English not trying to make a middling point about the occasional acceptability of it’s would have said “the repetition of it” in (4).) Anyway, my point is that it is only because it is a pronoun that it’s is not the standard form for the possessive of it. So why does being a pronoun matter? I don’t actually know exactly, but here’s my speculation:

English does not have a particularly extensive case system; a given word is usually written & pronounced the same whether it is the subject or object of a verb (Paolo ate the book vs. the book ate Paolo). In a lot of other languages, such as Estonian, Russian, and German, just to focus on Central and Eastern Europe, noun phrases are written differently depending on what role they perform in the sentence:

(5) Der Tisch gab den Tisch des Tisch(e)s dem Tisch(e)
The table gave the table of the table to the table.

(I cannot guarantee this example is perfect German, as I copied it verbatim from Wikipedia.) In (5), the subject has nominative case and so its article is der, whereas the second table is the direct object and gets accusative case. The other two tables have genitive case (possessive case, as with English ’s) and dative case (a to-phrase in English), respectively. English does have a little bit of case marking, but it only appears on pronouns (I ate the book vs. The book ate me), and even then it doesn’t appear on all pronouns (It ate you vs. You ate it).

What’s my point with this digression in Germanic morphology? Simple: Possessives are manifestations of genitive case, and pronouns in English manifest case differently from nouns. So it’s not all that surprising that pronouns have different possessive forms than they would if they were nouns. But given that it is the same in nominative and accusative cases, just like a noun, it is a little surprising that it’s possessive is a special case, especially since its and it’s sound identical. So yes, there is a clear-cut rule that the possessive of the pronoun it is its, but that’s competing with a separate rule saying that ’s is the possessive marker.

Same thing with your/you’re and their/they’re; if you think of the rule that possessives involve an apostrophe (for there is no possessive of a noun that does not include an apostrophe) before you think of the special rule that pronouns’ possessives do not involve apostrophes, you could easily write you’re or they’re for the possessives. I’m not saying it’s justified, per se. But it is a reasonable error — certainly more reasonable than one would expect given the invective spewed at those who make this mistake.

And, for the history buffs in the audience, let me point out that its is a somewhat recent addition to the language. Its earliest written citation in the OED is 1598, although it was apparently in use colloquially before then. In fact, through the 19th century, it’s and its were in competition to be the possessive form of it, and it looks like it’s was more popular in the 17th century. So it isn’t obvious that its should be the possessive pronoun, or at least it wasn’t at first.

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The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)

Preposterous Apostrophes V: Contractions

Contractions are pretty easy, but as I often do, I started looking at something kind of interesting and fell down a rabbit-hole of exciting historical usage studies! I assume you are all withering with glee at the possibility of links to old books that weren’t interesting when they were published. Let’s start by looking at how contractions are punctuated.

It is generally stated without qualification by grammar books that in a contraction, the apostrophe goes where the letter(s) have been removed. That works great for a lot of contractions, such as shouldn’t, wouldn’t, needn’t, oughtn’t, mightn’t, hadn’t, aren’t, I’m, we’ll, you’d, they’ve, it’s, would’ve, should’ve. The rule also works in some non-contraction situations: o’clock, O’Dell, an’ (for and), havin’, etc. But it doesn’t work for some less standard contractions like hafta (not *hav’ta), shoulda (*should’a), wanna (*wann’a), gonna (*go’n'a). And it doesn’t work for two big contractions: won’t (not *wo’n't) and shan’t (not *sha’n't).

To be fair, the ignorance of hafta and the like in the grammar rules isn’t surprising since most all grammarians consider these contractions things that shouldn’t be written in English. (Not because they’re too new – I’ve managed to find gonna attested in 1899.) Of course, it does lead to the question of why it’s so clear to native English speakers that wanna doesn’t have an apostrophe. Apostrophes are productive; it’s not that you learn the contractions into which apostrophes go, and never use an apostrophe in other contractions (witness the great Pittsburghian restaurant Eat ‘n Park, with a productive apostrophe on the and contraction). Why no one writes wann’a is unclear to me, but I think most everyone would share the intuition that it would remove a terrific weight from your chest if only that apostrophe weren’t in wann’a. So let’s leave this an unsolved problem for the moment.

The interesting cases are wo’n't (from woll not, a variant of will not that had some currency back in the day) and sha’n't (from shall not, as said by me and other putting on airs). These look crazy, right? But why? At first I was thinking it’s some sort of constraint we all share that you oughtn’t have two apostrophes in a single word. That would explain why I eat at Eat ‘n Park (the place for smiles) and not Eat ‘n’ Park. But that’s not quite it; a quick Google search turns up ~500K hits for O’Donnell’s and ~75K for O’Dell’s, so it’s not impossible to have two apostrophes in a word. I’ve definitely seen examples of ‘n’ for and, and in fact the two apostrophes look more natural than one to me.

Did the contractions won’t and shan’t spring into English fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s noggin? No, interestingly. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (printed in 1855), has wo’n't, as do some (modern) editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Ohio Educational Monthly in an article from 1868. Likewise, sha’n't was commonplace in the old days, plastered across the pages of the dreadful Victorian novels that I had to read in AP English as a lesson as to what happens to those who show an interest in reading. Books like Evelina; or, The history of a young lady’s entrance into the world (why did every single book in those days have to have a subtitle?)

Now the interesting thing is that won’t and shan’t live side-by-side with wo’n't and sha’n't in these old books. Some quick results on Google Books between 1600 and 1800: 777 won’ts, 57 wo’n'ts; 216 shan’ts, 73 sha’n'ts. Between 1600 and 1700: 48 won’ts, no wo’n'ts; 1 each of shan’t and sha’n't. So it seems it was never the case that the multiple-apostrophe form was more common. For some reason or another, English writers have always preferred a single apostrophe over strict application of “put apostrophes wherever a letter’s missing”. (Michael Quinion guesses that the double-apostrophe form was a later edition, suggested by logic-minded grammarians, that died out because it was a pain to write and looked weird.)

This single-apostrophe preference may be to blame for the rarity of double contractions like we’d've (which I use), couldn’t've (also good), or I’mn’t (which I definitely do not use). In fact, I might as well put in a plug here for double contractions, of which I’m a big fan, but it seems too few people are. Sprinkle some who’d'ves into your writing sometime. It’s superfun; your cheerfulness will increase at least twice as much from a quick double contraction as from an emoticon, I promise. ;) See? The emoticon just can’t compete.

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The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)

Arnold Zwicky’s Whack-a-Peeve

Arnold Zwicky’s got a great post over on Language Log about at about, as in:

(1) I ate a tuna and jellybean sandwich at about 4:15.

Basically, a bunch of prescriptivists have a pet peeve that at about is redundant because you’re “piling up” prepositions. It isn’t at all. First, look at these sentences without one of the prepositions:

(2)a. I ate a tuna and jellybean sandwich at 4:15.
(2)b. I ate a tuna and jellybean sandwich about 4:15.

(2)a does not mean the same thing as (1) – it might be that you had an alarm clock go off at precisely 4:15, flipped through your agenda, and found a note saying “EAT TUNA/JELLYBEAN SWICH”, and pulled one out of the fridge. And (2)b, to me, sounds tremendously colloquial – I would not write this in a paper, although I would without hesitation write (1). The prescriptivists argue that Omit Needless Words kicks in here and thus you’ve got to ditch one of the prepositions, but it’s plain to see that omitting a preposition changes the meaning or tone of the sentence: neither preposition is needless!

Zwicky makes a really important point that needs to be kept in mind by all grammarians: members of the same syntactic category (i.e., prepositions) can have different grammatical functions. With at about, at’s syntactic function is as an operator, whereas about’s function is as an adverbial. Piling up prepositions is commonplace (Zwicky cites numerous examples of unquestionably grammatical at about strings); what prescriptivists mean to complain about is piling up words of the same syntactic function, as in:

(3) Unsurprisingly, I ate a another tuna and jellybean around about 4:25.

I intend to remain agnostic about sentence (3); it is possibly better to only use around or about, because they both have an adverbial function, and they both have approximately the same meaning in that function.  The take-home point here is that when you’re trying to argue about language with something like Omit Needless Words, you’ve got to be sure that the words are truly needless, and are needless for a principled reason.  (Even then, ONW will lead you astray – I hope to blog about some new research on this point soon.)  As Zwicky puts it, the prescriptivists’ unstated rule is:

“Follow this advice, unless that would be wrong.”

Preposterous Apostrophes IV: History Lesson

I admit it. I am crotchety old fogey, even though I’m not old yet. I refer to people younger than me as “you kids”, and I say things like “you kids all have the iPods and your cellular telephones” and other things that I always pictured would come out of Mr. Wilson (of Dennis the Menace) if the strip fell into a wormhole and emerged in the modern day instead of the mid-50s. Hell, I’m petrified that I’m going to hit the wrong button on my cell phone, connect to the internet or download a ringtone, or some junk like that, and end up with a couple-hundred-dollar bill at the end of the month, because I’ve heard tell that kids today do that sort of thing. In fact, many callers will attest that they have had a conversation with me over the cell phone that abruptly terminated with an “What was that beep? Did you hear that beep? AAHH! What is it doing? Don’t do that! Cancel, cancel!!!!”

So of course I always have to fight the temptation to blindly ascribe any problem with the modern world to “kids today”. A lack of general math literacy, anti-social tendencies, cursing on the TV, poor service at the drive-through, rising budget deficits, sore muscles, cupcake non-conference schedules in big-money college football: all of these I’ve wanted so badly to yoke the kids with, due to their inattention to their educations. Of course, in truth only a few of these are modern phenomena (cupcake non-conference schedules have been around at least since Georgia Tech’s 1916 drubbing of Cumberland 222-0, for instance).

Likewise, I want to suggest to the curmudgeons who bewail the misuse of the apostrophe in our modern, devil-nay-care society that this too is not some new phenomenon from our modern world. As part of my research for the previous installment of Preposterous Apostrophes, I looked in where people wrote “the king’s of England”, seeking out instance of infixation, where the possessive marker was appended to the head of the phrase rather than the end of the phrase. What to my wondering eyes should appear but a Google Books result from 1757? Then another, from 1728! And still one more from 1851! Although for some of these the Early Modern English is too hard for me to clearly say one way or the other what the intended meaning is, it seems that most of these are cases of a writer using an apostrophe to form the plural of a common noun, a big no-no.

And, in a slightly more modern reference, I ate today at Peggy Sue’s, a diner in San Jose. On the wall above our booth, there was a signed cover from a Life magazine with Peggy Fleming on its cover, c. 1968. She had signed the magazine saying that Peggy Sue’s had “excellent burger’s”. So sadly we can’t shift all the apostrophe errors off onto the kids.

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The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)

Preposterous Apostrophes III: The kings of England’s

I was thinking about what to do next in the Preposterous Apostrophes series when I started thinking about the neat fact that the genitive (the linguist’s fancy term for possessive) case marker ’s is suffixed to the end of a phrase, not to the head of the phrase:

(1)a. The king of England’s fancy hairdo was not well-received.
(1)b. *The king’s of England fancy hairdo was not well-received.

This is a little unexpected given the behavior of some other English suffixes, such as the plural marker -s:

(2)a. *The king of Englands are not known for niceness.
(2)b. The kings of England are not known for niceness.

But then I started thinking about what happens when you apply both of these markers to a single phrase. Remember (as drilled into your head from kindergarten to twelfth grades, and possibly longer) that plural nouns ending in s have just the apostrophe as their genitive case marker, and plural nouns not ending in s have a genitive ’s. This suggests that if you have a plural phrase, like the kings of England, its genitive form should be the kings of England’s:

(3) ?The kings of England’s wax seals are stored in the Tower of London.

But something seemed a little off about this to me. So I decided to check online for “the kings of England’s”, figuring that surely a fair number of people must have seen fit to comment about things possessed by multiple kings of England. But in fact there were only 4500 results for this phrase, compared to some 61000 for “of the kings of England” (this number is inflated somewhat by phrases like “Chronicle of the Kings of England”, a book title that cannot be aptly paraphrased as “The Kings of England’s Chronicle”, but most of results I saw were possessives).

At this point I looked at the first Google result for “the kings of England’s”, and lo and behold it was The Tensor, a fellow linguist, blogging about the fact that the kings of England’s struck him as off as well. In fact, it’s really quite striking how similar our thought patterns were on this. (Even down the fact that for both of us, the king of England is the best phrase available to make possessive – but that’s linguists for you.) A commenter on the earlier post noted that, sticking with the constitutional monarchy theme, members of Parliament’s didn’t sound as bad as kings of England’s. I agree with The Tensor that members of Parliament’s was a slight improvement, but Google doesn’t seem to bear out our opinion: “the members of Parliament” hits outnumber “the kings of England” hits 4:1, but “the members of Parliament’s” outnumbers “the kings of England’s” only 2:1 – not that this is a clear finding one way or the other.

Some sort of conflict with pluralization and ’s is playing out here — things are a little different with “the king of England”. Let me first define two terms that with make this discussion much orthographically easier to follow: the s-genitive (forms like “the Pope’s ring”) and the of-genitive (forms like “the ring of the Pope”). Recall that for the kings of England, the of-genitive outnumbered the s-genitive 12:1. With the singular the king of England, the of-genitive outnumbers the s-genitive only 4:1. There definitely seems to be an effect of pluralization.

But (and this is the point where I put that first year’s worth of graduate study to use) why does the king of England also prefer the of-genitive? Catherine O’Connor and colleagues [fn. 1] have worked on the alternation between s-genitives and of-genitives and found that as the number of words in a possessor-phrase increases, it become more unwieldy to use the s-genitive (cf. the awkwardness of the sullen and angry lead singer’s microphone). Specifically, they found that phrases with three words are 4-10 times more likely to use the of-genitive than the s-genitive to form a possessive, and phrases with four or more words were 15-50 times more likely to do so. As the king of England is a four-word phrase, it is not surprising to see “of the king of England” preferred over “the king of England’s”, despite the awkward repetition of of. Likewise, this accounts for some of the reluctance to use the kings of England’s.

In the end, I don’t know what exactly all of this means yet; but it is the sort of thing that is suddenly becoming hip in linguistics (or perhaps I just think this because it’s what I do). The main reason that I bring it up is because it’s important to keep in mind that in some cases what feels right involves bending some other grammatical suggestions/rules (e.g., the suggestion that you shouldn’t have the same preposition twice in a row, as in of the king of England). You are probably a competent user of English, dear reader, and often you should trust your intuitions. I guess that’s my whole point with this blog — you don’t always need to check a reference book to find out how to use your language.

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fn. 1: I am struggling to find a reference to the paper in which this result is discussed, so if you find it, let me know. She discussed in it her class at the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute this year, and I got the number cited here from her class’s slides.

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The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)

Some more unique thoughts

I posted earlier about the adjective unique and a few reasons why I think there are situations in which very unique and the like are reasonable things to say. (These situations include (1) the comparision of different unique things by how common their type is, e.g., something that’s one-in-a-hundred is unique but something that’s one-in-a-billion is very unique, or (2) as a means of qualifying how removed a unique thing is from other comparable things, e.g., a dog that could fly would be unique, but a dog that could fly and talk would be very unique) And you very well may disagree with me that these are things you would say, or you may disagree that these are not the way that people generally use very unique. That’s fine, as my intention with the previous post was to establish merely that it is not logically impossible to have something be very unique, not that the way it is used is ideal. In fact – I think I didn’t make this clear in the earlier post – I prefer to avoid the word unique because it smacks of advertising gimmickry, and very few things are, in my opinion, unique.

renaissanceguy commented in response to the earlier post with a reasonable and nicely stated objection: “I think it is important to have words to express precise concepts. We already have a way of expressing the concept that people mean when they say “very unique,” which is “very unusual”. If something is sufficiently unusual to be one-of-a-kind, then it is good to have a word for it.” I disagree with the assumption of the second sentence that if there is one way of expressing a comment there is no desire for a second, but otherwise I agree. After all, I majored in mathematics, so I am familiar with how pleasant life is when all terms have precise and explicit definitions, and it would be good (I think) if the world lent itself to as cut-and-dried of definitions as abstract mathematics does. However, this is not the case. Very unique does often incur on the domain rightfully owned by very unusual, but this is a matter of the definition of unique often incurring on the domain of unusual, as in:

(1) That’s a unique hat.

The problem is that here unique and unusual blur more than one would think. Take, for example, the site Unique Coat Hangers. The hangers they sell are in one sense not at all unique, since you can buy more than one of the same style. But at the same time, the individual styles may be unlike any other given style of coat hanger one has ever seen. So the hangers of a given style are themselves merely unusual even though the style is unique. This is a weird situation, and sort of tough to wrap one’s head around. It’s no wonder that unique and unusual get interwined, given that complex situations like this are not unusual. (Think of “unique” clothing items, “unique” cars, “unique” ideas, etc. that are one-of-a-kind in one person’s view though merely unusual in the the global view.)

My point is that you could have unique fill a single role, as “one-of-a-kind”, but you’re going to have to specify what kind the thing is the only exemplar of, and that’s a murky problem. Here’s an open question with regards to this: given the sentence

(2) The striped coat hanger was unique amongst those in my closet, and the style was unique amongst those manufactured since 1985, yet my sister had two of the exact same hanger in her house,

is it fair to say The striped hanger is unique? Does your opinion change with the sentence My striped hanger is unique? My opinion is that the first is sort of unacceptable but the second sentence is a bit better. I’m interested in what other people think, though. Can something be unique if anything like it exists elsewhere? Can something be unique within a context (in my closet, to me, in its design, etc.) if something like it exists elsewhere?

If you find the answers to these sorts of questions simplistic, and you can’t think of any situations in which the uniqueness of an item would be open for debate, then you are wiser than me and are perhaps justified in holding the opinion that unique can’t mean unusual. But if you too are having trouble delineating unique and unusual, I think you can see why I am willing to let their usages overrun a bit. (Of course, I am not advocating that unique and unusual have anywhere near identical meanings. I can think of situations in which I would only consider unique acceptable and other situations where I would only consider unusual acceptable.) It would be nice if you could say that unique can only be used for truly “one-of-a-kind” objects, but it’s not possible in practice to do so.  Unique will at times mean something like unusual, and in those sorts of cases, it wouldn’t be surprising or illogical to see modifiers like very, somewhat, rather, terribly, notably, etc. modifying unique.

Summary: Definitions in the world are fuzzy, and they overlap. Unique and unusual aren’t as distinct as one might like to think. Because the category of unique things and the category of unusual things aren’t distinct, it’s reasonable to expect/allow unique to behave like unusual in some circumstances.

Preposterous Apostrophes II: Pluralization

The previous edition of Preposterous Apostrophes considered the formation of possessives. This is probably the main usage of apostrophes in English, since contractions are generally frowned upon in formal writing, and apostrophes are often omitted from contractions in ephemeral electronic communications. (I admit that I walk an ambiguous line myself, typing Ill, wont, cant, and well in place of I’ll, etc. in text messages, because getting apostrophes in the message requires you to press a complicated combination of buttons, and I’m really not that dexterous.) However, there are a variety of other usages of apostrophes, and one of these is in pluralization. When to use an apostrophe in a plural is a tough nut to crack, and of course those who know how to do it take great glee in putting down those who don’t. Most any prescriptivist you meet will have at the ready a set of examples of what is known as the greengrocer’s apostrophe: ’s used to form a plural when just s is called for.

Just a quick refresher on pluralization: English nouns have fascinatingly convoluted plural forms. Most nouns take an -s, some take an -es, and some don’t change at all. That’s all pretty simple and standardized. But then come the historical relics, common nouns that followed non-productive means of pluralization, like umlaut (mouse to mice, for example) or Greek/Latin paradigms (antennae, data, radii, and the like). And then there are the really weird cases, like the idea that some nouns ending in o are pluralized with -s while others are pluralized with -es. I can’t keep these all that straight myself, but potatoes outnumbers potatos 38:1 on Google while radios outnumbers radioes 1500:1, so it looks like people on the whole are aware of this -o pluralization distinction.

You’ll note that despite all of these weird pluralization methods, for common nouns there is nothing that gets pluralized with ’s. ’s is reserved for possessives. So a sign reading We have apple’s is incorrect, and potentially (although almost never in practice) ambiguous. The same is true for proper names – ’s is again reserved for possessives. The Doyles live at my house, which one could refer to as the Doyles’ house — whereas my apartment is Doyle’s because only one Doyle lives there.

Boring, boring stuff. The fun comes, the fur flies, and the apostrophes arise when you’re dealing with special nouns like numerals, letters, abbreviations, and acronyms. Consider the idiom:

(1)a. Mind your p’s and q’s
(1)b. Mind your ps and qs

(1)b just looks weird to me, and it seems to be pretty well agreed-upon that it’s proper to use ’s to pluralize a letter — all of the grammar books I read through that weighed in on this said that plurals of letters need the ’s, although one (Harbrace College Handbook) said that only lowercase letters get the apostrophe. This jibes with my perception of general usage; Google shows a 4:1 preference for apostrophes in this idiom, and it looks like most of the results without apostrophes use uppercase P and Q. Still nothing very contentious. How about abbreviations? Abbreviations with periods take ’s when pluralized, which is probably because they look more awkward without apostrophes:

(2)a. T.V.’s, Ph.D.’s, etc.’s vs. (2)b. T.V.s, Ph.D.s, etc.s

This is the opinion of all the books I read, and looking up actual usage data is going to be a lot more labor than I’m prepared to expend. Suffice it to say that I avoid using periods in pluralized abbreviations because they look atrocious no matter how you write them. (The Associated Press Stylebook & Libel Manual seems to favor the (2)b pluralization method, as it has an entry listed under Ph.D.s, but the book does not, to my knowledge come out one way or the other on this point in general.)

I’m sorry it took so long — I assure you I was as bored as you during those examples — but at last we come to three controversial points: how does one pluralize numerals, abbreviations without periods, and “words used as words”? By “words used as words” I mean cases where you are pluralizing the word itself, not the object to which the word refers. For instance, if you’re proof-reading a paper that uses the word the seventy times, should you say:

(3)a. The paper contains 70 the’s.
(3)b. The paper contains 70 thes.

(3)a is favored by most of the books I read, with one (Harbrace College Handbook again) requiring an apostrophe only if confusion would result from not using an apostrophe, and another (The Associated Press Stylebook & Libel Manual) saying that an apostrophe should never be used with words used as words (although its example puts double quotes around the words – “ifs,” “ands” and “buts”). However, a quick usage survey shows that ifs ands and buts beats out if’s and’s and but’s 10:1 on Google. In my opinion, it depends on how you like to refer to words as words. I tend to italicize them, so that forces me to use an apostrophe in the plural. Either way, someone’s got your back.

Same thing with numerals. No one uses apostrophes to pluralize numbers (e.g., I’ve been rolling fives and sixes all day), but some people do for numerals (e.g., I’ve been rolling 7’s and 11’s). Various prescriptions fall on different sides of the fence on this one, with Webster’s Third calling for apostrophes and the AP demanding a lack of apostrophes. I usually omit the apostrophes, I think, but neither way seems odd to me. Again, follow your heart.

And lastly, what about abbreviations that don’t use periods (TV, CD-ROM, PhD)? Some of the stuff I’ve read demands a -s pluralization (AP Stylebook, College Writer’s Reference), some demands a ’s pluralization (Woe is I), and some says that both are fine (Harbrace College Handbook). You’re free to handle these cases how you want, I think.

So, in summary, pluralize these as follows:

most nouns: no apostrophe
lowercase letters: apostrophe
uppercase letters: either
words as words: either
numerals: either
abbreviations ending in periods: apostrophe
abbreviations without periods: either

Now, if we apply these results to the Apostrophe Protection Society’s page I linked to above about misuse of the apostrophe, it turns out that a few of the complaints are (surprise!) spurious:

Royal College of GP’s
1000’s of roll ends
We pay cash for your TV’s VCR’s Home Hifi
Copy your DVD’s
Don’ts / Do’s

Each of these falls completely within the realm of acceptable apostrophe usage, as defined by the grammar books I am familiar with. Sorry guys! You’ll have to turn your righteous indignation elsewhere!

***

The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)