If one is abbreviating “purchase order” to P.O. do you use an apostrophe? This is hard to explain-so would one say i.e., P.O.s completed? Or P.O.'s completed? I’ts not a possesive or a contraction that I can tell so I’m stumped. We want to be correct in our business correspondence.
Sorry, make that a punctuation question :o
according to my copy of “The Elements of Style” (Strunk and White), it should be “P.O.s”… as it is not a possessive…
I believe it would be P.O’s Saying P.O.'s would be like saying Purchase Order 's The period, it seems to me at least, denotes the end of the word AND a space.
or, you could just write “POs”… assuming the person you are writing to KNOWS what a PO is…
However you abbreviate it, you do not use an apostrophe. I’ll take a look in my Hacker book tonight to make sure.
I usually see it POs. Actually, I don’t see periods much in acronyms any more. The apostrophe used to be an acceptable way to pluralize acronyms, since you are presenting a letter (like the O in order) and then skipping a bunch of letters (rder) and then tacking on another letter. So it’s sort of like a contraction. But it’s not really acceptable practice any more, since if you know what a PO is you are going to know what POs are, but PO’s looks way too much like a possessive.
In fact, I blame the practice of pluralizing acronyms with an apostrophe (DUI’s, MRI’s) partly for the super-evil practice of pluralizing everything with an apostrophe. Person’s who add apostrophe’s to all the word’s they pluralize give me rashe’s (rash’s? rash’es? It’s starting too look like an ethnic restaurant … “Come to Rash’es and have some spice’y French fri’es!”) But I digress.
Anyway, POs or P.O.s should do fine. PoS usually means Point of Sale, but it can also mean Piece of … which is probably better rendered POS.
I’m glad I’m not the only one sickened by this, although in my case it’s a headache and gritting of teeth.
I would go with POs.
FWIW, most classical grammar texts advise the use of an apostrophe when pluralizing acronyms. Strunk and White differ from the majority opinion here (which is unusual), but modern usage tends to support them over the traditional texts.
Anyone else note the irony in the Thread Title? Typos can be such fun…
i think P.O. requires periods because P and O are initials, not an acronym. an acronym spells or coins a word like ‘SCUBA’ or ‘FUBAR’.
no i take it back. initials don’t necessarily require periods if the initials have become established as the normal way of referencing the thing.
This recently came up in my son’s tenth grade home school English class. He was studying plurals. When pluralizing single letters such as T or X, add an apostrophe.
Ex:
There are three t’s in the word tattle.
IIRC, the book did not discuss acronyms per se, but logic would dictate adding an apostrophe to PO just for clarity.
I could be wrong, however.
Oh man. I’m so confused.
Yeah, it looks like you’ve hit the question right on the head. Is PO established enough as an unpunctuated abbreviation to be pluralized without any marks? I’d say yes, but others may disagree. My rule of thumb is, if an abbreviation is commonly seen in lower case, I always include the periods. E.g., I would never render “e.g.” as “eg”. If the abbreviation is commonly all caps, I leave out the marks unless it is quite uncommon. So I would say NSF (not sufficient funds - a pretty common term where I work) or DUI, but I would render sodium lauryl sulfate as S.L.S. (That came up in a thread on canker sores, and I think I broke my own rule and rendered it SLS. Oh well.)
This is not a grammar question, but a matter of style. Some manuals on style advocate using an apostrophe in the plural of letters and numbers and some don’t. Most newspapers don’t because it saves print. I don’t think an initialization (which PO is) is any different. PO is not an acronym since it is not a word. I think a true acronym would not use an apostrophe in plurals.
As far as what’s an acronym, we just had a thread on that.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=46209
How about just saying that the letter t appears in the word tattle three times?
How’s that for a tongue-twister?
Yes, you’re right. With my browser’s handy search function I noted that it was I who brought who brought the word “acronym” into this thread. Bad Boris! It’s funny though, I always thought the term “TLA” (three-letter acronym) was sort of intended to be self-referential, but it obviously isn’t under the dictionary definition. I guess if it were spelled out as three-letter abbreviation it would be.