August 2010: Don’t Get Possessive With Your Plurals

In the last post I offered you a challenge: to type the word ’til in MS Word . . . with a properly curving apostrophe. If you tried it, you probably typed ‘til (note the mark is actually an upside-down apostrophe).

This happens because the apostrophe key actually represents three different characters: apostrophe, left single quote, and right single quote. In some fonts, they all look the same: a tapered vertical bar, like a half-size exclamation point without the point. But in the preferred Times New Roman and Arial, Word wants the apostrophe and right quote [’] to curve up and the left quote [‘] to curve down.

So to figure out which of the three characters you meant to type, Word kind of has to guess. And most of the time it’s right. Because usually when that key—let’s call it apoquote—comes between a space and an alphanumeric key, you’re starting a quote:

“A quote within a quote uses ‘single quote’ marks. It isn’t hard to remember.”

So the apoquote should be the down-curving left quote.

            For letter-apoquote-letter, the apoquote must be an apostrophe, and for letter-apoquote-space, it’s probably a right quote. (Of course, it could be an apostrophe too, but the characters are the same.)

            So the leading apostrophe as in ’til is one of those rare cases where Bill Gates can’t read your mind. It’s space-apoquote-letter, which looks like the start of a quote.

            So, how do you type it right?

1. Type apoquote-apoquote-t-i-s: ‘’til
2. See how you’ve got left-quote, right-quote just before the word? Stick your cursor in between those two characters. ‘|’til
3. Then just backspace, and the offending character is gone. ’til

There! You’ve outsmarted the richest man in the world. Don’t you feel powerful?

But you can’t completely outsmart the apostrophe without an understanding of when not to use it. When making a noun plural, you never use an apostrophe. Never, ever, ever (almost!*).

You probably knew that. It makes sense theoretically. A possessive is an adjective, and a plural is a noun. There should be no confusion.

But listen to your subconscious as you read the italics in the following (correctly punctuated) sentence:

                        The Smiths lived in that house during the 1990s.

            You can probably hear yourself thinking it: That no look right! Must . . . use . . . apostrophes . . .

            Why should these words confound us? Both words are clearly plural nouns (the subject and object of a preposition). Why do we want to apostrophize the s?

            For the Smiths (that is, the group of people named Smith), it may be our convention of using the phrase “the Smiths’ ” as shorthand for, “the Smiths’ house” (that is, the house belonging to the group of people named Smith). Because “house” is understood, the possessive effectively acts as a noun:

                        The Smiths’ flooded during 1990’s hurricane.

            This sentence also demonstrates the proper use of “1990’s”—something belonging 1990—as distinguished from the 1990s (that is, all the years that start with nineteen-ninety). Why do we want to use “1990’s” to represent everything from the fall of Communism to the Y2K scare?

That may be because we see the shocking sight of a numeral 0 next to a letter s. We somehow want to separate them with an apostrophe.

Likewise for pluralized abbreviations and acronyms. Listen to your subconscious scream as you read the following:

                        A wall of HDTVs showed commercials for new PCs that act as ATMs.

            Again, this sentence is correctly punctuated. A lower-case s does not need any separation from a string of capital letters or digits because they are different classes of characters.

And that brings us to the aforementioned asterisk. Consider the following:

            The name Isaiah contains two is and two as.

In this case, your subconscious is right; without separation, the plurals look like the words is and as. So the only time you should use an apostrophe s to make a plural is with a letter of the alphabet:

            The name Isaiah contains two i’s and two a’s.

Perhaps another good reason for this rule is that it avoids unintentionally suggestive sentences like, “My report card was all Bs.”