I am helping a friend write his book about repairing old radios.
Probably my biggest pet peeve with respect to English usage is that of extraneous/erroneous apostrophes. I especially hate to see them used in simple pluralization, making it look like a possessive case. (i.e., “apostrophe’s.”)
I don’t even like to use them when referring to a given decade – I will just put “1970s.”
But the problem I’m running into here is when the text refers to vacuum tubes in the plural by their specific part numbers, because those part numbers almost always have both numbers and letters. Hence, although the letters in these designations are always capitalized, I feel it is unclear to refer to, say, “6SL7s.”
So I’m wondering, what is the convention here? Should I just try to always steer the sentence around so that it’s referring to specific tubes in the singular? Because I’d really hate to have to put “6SL7’s.”
You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place here because this sort of situation, generally speaking, is an exception to the no-apostrophes-in-plurals rule. That is, using an apostrophe here to make the plural is accepted by most style guides. That said, it’s not required to do so either.
I would just go ahead and use the apostrophes here, but if there’s anything I understand it’s quirks like this. If I happened to have this particular quirk, I might say something early on like: “Whether you have one 6SL7 or two 6SL7s, the procedure is the same,” and then hope the reader takes the hint. Or if that sounds too stilted for you, just refer to 6SL7s as “them.” This, most often, isn’t all that hard to do.
The important thing is not what the convention is…The important thing is to communicate clearly.
A sentence like " keep the 6SL7s protected from static electricity" is confusing. It makes me think there is a part called 6SL7s, and maybe I should treat it differently than a part called 6SL7.
You must separate the plual s from the part number.
I would use the apostrophe.
It’s clear to your readers.( And I’ll bet that most of your readers are not grammar fiends and won’t care about conventions, anyway.)
I agree with this. If you can’t (perhaps it would be overuse) just say “6SL7 tubes,” then use the convention that provides clarity. And I hate extraneous apostrophes.
I once thought that commas and periods inside quotation marks (in the U.S.) would follow a similar fate, out of necessity, in the computer age. If you wrote in a manual:
…what would someone following the instruction in a literal manner enter in the data field? “ABC”? Or “ABC.”? But apparently this hypothetical ambiguity was not a concern to anyone but me.
Thanks everyone! Your advice and opinions have been most helpful, and reassuring. I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing that Giles suggested, but I know that sooner or later a sentence will come up where that won’t work. It’s nice to have educated input in this kind of quandary.
I think Giles is right - in fact, I think there’s a possible case for the singular being exactly the same as the plural; “The 6SL7 is faulty” / “I have ordered a dozen 6SL7”
especially as this is a technical context - so the text in which the term is embedded should be clear and precise too.
Unfortunately, it’s only the cute little puppies that die. You can throw as many apostrophes as you like at the ugly fully-grown dogs, and it won’t hurt them.
