uh, I meant initialisms!
“non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem”
Despite what Strunk says, if you’re going to add an apostrophe-ess to words ending in ess (e.g., Jones becomes Jones’s) then do the same for Jesus (making it Jesus’s). The practice of pronouncing Jesus’ as GEE-sus is as archaic as using thee and thy. Sure, Billy Graham and Maya Angelou might do it in their grand and elouquent sermons and speeches, but that’s not how the new generation pronounces the possessive of Jesus. In common parlance, people say GEE-suh-sez, and thus, it should be written Jesus’s.
There. That’s my pet peeve of the day.
Peace.
I agree with Stark’s comment on Pluto’s inquiry.
If you use an 's to show the plural of an acronym, then how do you show the possesive of a single example of the acronym?
For example, “The M.P.'s vote.”
If the 's means more than one M.P., then “vote” is a verb, meaning that more than one M.P. is voting. But if 's means a singular possessive, then it is referring to the vote (noun) of a particular M.P., and you’ve got a sentence fragment.
Best to follow the same rule as for nouns: 's is singular possesive, s is plural.
Well Tipi asked a slightly different question than mine and I wasn’t sure whether to make a new thread, actually I didn’t see this one before posting… So I am reposting below:
How would someone write: “The McDonald’s (plural) of the world…” McDonald’s, here, representing a term with a specific meaning. So far I’ve received various replies (McDonalds, McDonalds’, McDonald’s’, and McDonald’ses) to my query.
Pluto, don’t listen to Stark. Though the apostraphe used in pluralizing acronyms has been dropped in less formal writing especially on the web, most style guides (like Strunk and White and the AP) say that the apostraphe is necessary or preferred. There was a thread discussing exactly this just a couple of weeks ago (I started it - I’m a tech writer also). I’d link you to it but, for some reason, I can’t get the search engine to work.
The web is changing the way we use written language very quickly. I am very happy to be here to watch it happen. However, some of the changes I don’t like. I miss the double space after a period. It makes it much harder to scan a page without the clear visual sentence breaks. The apostraphe for plural acronyms and “initializations” may disapppear soon.
If men had wings,
and bore black feathers,
few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
Finally, a debate with at least a shred of empirical evidence!
VileOrb, I don’t have my AP guide with me, so I had to turn the Web for backup of my post regarding acronyms and initialisms – though I’d swear the AP advises against the apostrophe method. I’ll have to check tonight.
Anyway, found a site written by a copy editor at the Washington Post. He says no apostrophe is needed in initialisms. http://www.theslot.com/part2.html#rbi
Of course, he also flies in the face of the AP and advises in favor of s’s, so what the hell does he know? 
~ Complacency is far more dangerous than outrage ~