Monday, July 30, 2012

It's All About the Benjamins

John writes that this apostrophe catastrophe causes hundreds of "daggers in his eyes."

To make a number such as 100 plural, you can just add an "s," but in this case, it would be better to just write "hundreds of uses." This looks like it is saying "one hundreds of uses."

Thanks, John!

Posted by Becky at 10:39 PM

5 comments:

Tanner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
October 4, 2012 at 2:21 PM
Tanner said...

I'll take issue with this. I like your blog, and many of the poor punctuation examples here ARE like daggers in my eyes, but not this one.

Many writers still use an apostrophe after a numeral, acronym, or abbreviation (just like many writers still use the Oxford comma, as I did in that sentence).

I think it's appropriate to write "all my CD's from the 1970's," and plenty of style guides agree. (See below.)

Whether the guides are right or wrong (the Oxford ED seems to think both ways are appropriate), there's at least enough controversy over the topic not to excoriate a writer for using the apostrophe.


http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/apostrophe.html

http://englishplus.com/news/news1201.htm

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/apostrophe

October 4, 2012 at 2:23 PM
Becky said...

Hi Tanner,
Thanks for your comment! I think my bigger issue with this one is the use of "100s" instead of "hundreds."

October 4, 2012 at 5:25 PM
CRj said...

I think "Many uses including" would be a better choice.

October 15, 2012 at 3:24 AM
Teresa Halminton said...

Yeah, many other choices.
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May 14, 2019 at 4:42 AM

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