this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.
It's incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.
That's half-right. Upper-case letters aren't pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of 'R' is 'Rs' but the plural of 'r' is 'r's'.) With numbers (written as '123') it's optional - IIRC, it's more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they're written in all caps. I'm not sure what you mean by decades.
By decades they meant "the 1970s" or "the 60s"
I don't know if we can rely on British popularity, given y'all's prevalence of the "greengrocer's apostrophe."
Never heard of the greengrocer's apostrophe so I looked it up. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-greengrocers-apostrophe-1690826
I absolutely love that there's a group called the Apostrophe Protection Society. Is there something like that for the Oxford Comma? I'd gladly join them!
I will die on both of those hills alongside you.
In fact, there’s a hit song called “Oxford Comma”!
Hah, I do not like the greengrocer's apostrophe. It is just wrong no matter how you look at it. The Oxford comma is a little different - it's not technically wrong, but it should only be used to avoid confusion.
I use it for fun, frivolity, and beauty.
Oh right - that would be the same category as numbers then. (Looked it up out of curiosity: using apostrophes isn't incorrect, but it seems to be an older/less formal way of pluralising them.)
Now, plurals aside, which is better,
The 60s
Or
The '60s
?
Why use for lowercase?
Because otherwise if you have too many small letters in a row it stops looking like a plural and more like a misspelled word. Because capitalization differences you can make more sense of As but not so much as.
That looks like an oddly capitalised "as"
That really gives the reason it's acceptable to use apostrophes when pluralising that sort of case
Because English is stupid
It's not stupid. It's just the bastard child of Germany, Dutch, French, Celtic and Scandinavian and tries to pretend this mix of influences is cool and normal.
Victim blaming and ableism!
The French and Scandinavian bits were NOT consensual.
(Don't forget Latin btw)
There are plenty of non Norman consensual French words and the Danes had as much a right to be there as the Angles and the Saxons did in kicking the celts out. Let's not even talk about if the anglo-Saxons had more legitimate claim than the norse-gaels.