I almost believe “CD’s” is right because the apostrophe indicates missing letters from “Compact Disks” rather than a plural in its own right.
I am not a linguist, but I wrote a rant on the subject, presented here for your delectation.
This ain’t right, since otherwise you should be writing C’D’s. It should be CDs. See rule 3 at the Apostrophe Protection Society website.
When I’d first joined the Army back in 1979, the correspondence guidelines required abbreviations such as CD to be pluralized with the apostrophe: CD --> CD’s. A couple of years later, those guidelines were changed to require just the s: CD --> CDs. Just as in so many other endeavors, a number of people are slow to change.
No apostrophe discussion should be without a link to this handy guide.
This is not really an interesting linguistics issue or grammar issue, because it concerns a simple issue of style. It’s not even really a punctuation issue, since I doubt any of you who are complaining about 's being used for plurals has ever really been confused by the issue. The reason confusion occurs is because there are acceptable ways to use the 's to form plurals, including forming the plurals of letters or numbers (1970’s and X’s). It’s considered acceptable to write 1970s or 1970’s. Do you really see a big difference there?
The New York Times is notorious for its incorrect use of possessive apostrophes—they even had some kind of half-assed op-ed piece defending themselves for “She was born in the 1920’s” and “He started acting in his 30’s.”
If I made mistakes like that at my magazine, I would be so out of work.
Thanks Lagged2Death for the handy guide. I am thinking of having it put on a stamp which I can apply to those “banana’s 59 cents” signs – or the forearm of the offenders if possible.
I think it’s an interesting issue not necessarily linguistically or grammatically but maybe educationally – why aren’t people learning these things in school? As a former teacher I reject the idea that “grammar teachers aren’t doing their jobs” since I spent one entire semester trying to teach my COLLEGE FRESHMEN the difference between it’s and its, which I wonder why they didn’t learn sooner. I still wonder, but they did not learn. Was I failing to do my job? How, I wonder?
It’s actually getting worse, if you can believe that.
I saw this on another message board:
Twice!
Aaaarrgghhh! My eyes! My eyes!
Exapno, check out this picture I took in Dublin the other week.
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1970s vs. 1970’s
There’s one easy way to solve this: GOOGLEFIGHT!!!
*btw, same result for 1980(’)s and 1990(’)s
Y’all have have all managed to hit a subject with more scope than expected. The krauts are doing it, too. A restaurant downtown here has a chalkboard out front where they post the daily special. For the last couple of weeks, it has had a reference to a certain meal available on all Tuesdays (Dienstags.) They’ve consistently spelled it “Dienstag’s,” which is definitely not the the norm in Germany.
How in heavens name is this crap spreading across the whole world, in multiple languages?
Arrrrggggghhhhhh!
heaven’s name
Dragontoes, I would like to know whose jobs are the English teachers doing? I don’t think it is fair to blame educators for something that seems to be a problem across all of society. My high school Physics teacher tought me a lot about circuitry, but I don’t have any idea how to identify circuits today. Is that his fault?
Let’s blame computers. It seems to me that computers have brought about quite a loss in the amount of writing that children have to do. Without practice, it is tough to remember the rules of grammar. When people do use thier computers to write, the writing is often full of abbreviations and a lack of puntuation. Mistakes that are caught by programs on the computer don’t teach anyone anything.
As a side note: What about the influence of “cute” spelling changes, often seen in advertising, and thier affect on young children learning to read and spell? It took me awhile to convince my son that Krispy Kreme doughnuts taste great, but they weren’t helping him with his upcoming spelling test.
taught, tought… See what I mean!
New from Michael Crichton: The Apostrophe Strain.
jjimm, how is this even possible?
Exactly.
Not exactly, IMHO. After all, orthography is a linguistic issue.