Greengrocers apostrophe’s
We’ve all seen the signs on greengrocers’ displays. You know: the ones giving the price of “potato’s”, “cabbage’s” or “pea’s”, for instance.
Plurals never end in ‘s (apostrophe-s). That also applies to decades (the 1990s) and to abbreviations (RSJs).
I’m not sure how the practice arose in the first place, unless it was to mask uncertainty over how to spell some of the more tricky plurals like potatoes.
If you’re not sure about how to spell a plural, look it up in an dictionary. You can find the OED online here:
AskOxford
(By the way, did you spot both the deliberate mistakes in the title?)
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March 28th, 2007 at 13:46 UTC
‘s for a plural is correct in Dutch when a word ends in a vowel – for instance, the plural of the Dutch word for an umbrella (paraplu) is paraplu’s. But it’s not much help knowing that if you’re trying to write in English.
March 28th, 2007 at 14:24 UTC
“Do’s and don’ts” is another common one, but I must admit that “dos” sometimes looks a bit strange. Is there any way around this?
As for the superfluous apostrophe in abbreviations, even many corporate sites have them. How many times have you seen things like the following?
Save £1,000′s!
FAQ’s
DVD’s
March 28th, 2007 at 14:57 UTC
I’ve never seen a satisfactory way around “dos”. I remember being confused for ages on first reading a line in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where Zaphod says “Bat’s dos, I can’t work it out.”
This was several years before DOS was a familiar computing term, so that wasn’t the source of my confusion. I just didn’t see what Douglas Adams meant.