How to use apostrophes, part I: Plurals
I am, frankly, embarrassed that so many technical bloggers cannot use apostrophes correctly. Developers can put semicolons in the right place in their code (maybe it’s just because the compiler tells them they got it wrong), but they can’t get the much more simple rules of English right. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Anyway, here’s part I in an ongoing rant-series, which deals with plurals.
First off, you never, ever put an apostrophe before the ’s’ in a word which is a plural. It’s that simple. Some examples:
| Example | Comments |
|---|---|
| Guy’s tent peg is bent | indicates a single person, Guy, who owns a single bent tent peg |
| The guys’ tent pegs are broken | indicates that there are several blokes who jointly own some tent pegs that are bent. |
| There are guys and girls | there are several men and several girls. The sentence doesn’t say anything about what they own. |
I knew a bloke who would start every single email with the word Guy’s.
There was no one at our company called Guy.
So, every time you use an apostrophe, consider whether the word is plural. If so, put the apostrophe after the ‘S’.
Next time: abbreviation.
Figure that one out
Here’s a photo of an emergency phone in Norfolk. It’s a little indistinct in the photo, but the instructions say: ‘Dial 999 for Coastguard, Police, Fire or Ambulance’. Thankfully, we had a mobile phone.
Programs say the funniest things
Elgato’s EyeTV software developed a spontaneous and sarcastic sense of humour today:
