🚀 go-pugleaf

Colin B. wrote:
> In comp.unix.solaris Coy Hile <hile@cse.psu.edu> wrote:

>>Am I the only one who still (correctly -- though the other option is 
>>AFAIK equally correct as well) pluralizes acronyms with an apostrophe?

> You'd be hard pressed to convince many linguists that an apostrophe is
> the correct way to pluralise acronyms. With VERY VERY FEW exceptions, the
> standard practice is (and for centuries has been) just to add an "s".

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many linguists who care one way
or the other about prescriptivist grammar rules or even who think that
most grammarians (English teachesr, people who write grammar books, etc.)
have more than a weak grasp on the real rules behind language.  There is
no universal agreement among grammarians and there is no basis for
deciding what is "right" other than convention.

Having said that, in English and in typing class, I was taught that
plurals of things which aren't words, such as literal strings of
characters (like a model number), acronyms, and numbers, should be
made with "'s".  I was also taught that literal strings of characters
should be underlined.  According to those rules, I should type
(where I've substituted ~~~~ for underlining):

	Both of the keyboardists had P80's from Roland.
                                      ~~~

	I took a typing class in the 1980's.

	After eating so many MRE's, they desperately wanted a hot meal.

As near as I can tell, both the underlining and the apostrophe serve
the purpose of showing a separation between the characters and the
"s" the forms the plural.  One can easily imagine a model number or
acronym that ends in an "s", and it's a little awkward to shove the
"s" for the plural right up against the letters in the model number.
For example, Commodore sold a lot of 1084 monitors with its Amiga
computers, and after a while they introduced a stereo version of
the monitor (which had built-in speakers) called the 1084S.  Without
the apostrophe, things get awkward.  Compare this:

	The 1084S's were neat because you could hook them up to a VCR.

with this:

	The 1084Ss were neat because you could hook them up to a VCR.

Underlining would help:

	The 1084Ss were neat because you could hook them up to a VCR.
	    ~~~~~

but underlining isn't available on certain typewriters or in plain
ASCII text.

There's a similar rule sometimes used when an acronym is used as a
verb.  For example, KO means "knock out" (or "knocked out"), and
it's quite reasonable to say,

	The big guy had no trouble KO'ing the little guy.

And then EAC is short for Exact Audio Copy (a Windows program IIRC),
and you could write,

	I EAC'ed the tracks, so they should be bit-perfect.

In neither of these cases does the apostrophe look weird (to me at
least), and I think that's because it's a different usage and it
doesn't trigger the same mental reaction as "'s" does.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I think "'s" as a plural in
these cases does have a legitimate purpose, and it has been taught
that way in the past as the standard and correct way to do it.
Whether we still need to use "'s" for acronyms' plurals is a whole
different question.  I may be that we have the means now to
disambiguate situations like the aforementioned "1084Ss" easily
enough with fonts (like putting "1048S" in italics or Courier) or
in other ways, and maybe apostrophes for acronym plurals should
be on the way out.

But if so, I don't think that for that to happen that we need to
believe that the apostrophe was never correct.  It's OK for the
rules of grammar and punctuation to change.  After all, language
is constantly changing, and there was a day when written language
didn't even have punctuation at all.  (Heck, as I understand it,
the written form of Hebrew doesn't even have vowels.)

   - Logan