Common heretical uses of apostrophes and how to avoid them

[specialknives]

Today I am Plain English-reviewing a glossary of curriculum terminology written by a major UK education body. It is full of poor grammar.

For example, the writer uses which where they should use that, but they are so oblivious to their error that they've inserted commas to fool the MS Word grammarcheck. This produces sentences like The part of the

Comments

[jackfirecat]

"DVD's" is not as heretical as the others (it's old school), but most people and style guides these days would agree with you - we've shifted to a simpler rule. (And, aside, in the U.S.A. they do still use stops like that a lot.)

There is something deep-rooted in English that make people want to put apostophes in in these cases, but I'm not grammarian enough to understand why it should be.

[specialknives]

I'm all for open-minded and light-touch editing and yes language does change over time, but there are some instances where it's just wrong - regardless of how widely used. DVD's is a good example of this - it may be acceptable to many but:
1. only because people are willing to reinforce it by repeating it
2. the only possible outcome of this is the apostrophe rules becoming more inconsistent and confusing, when the point of punctuation is to avoid confusion.

"60's, 70's and 80's" is another example which is probably more common than the correct use.

People tell me they use apostrophes in these cases because if you don't:
- it looks wrong, or
- reads confusingly.

The latter seems to be an effect from the fact that the incorrect use is more common and familiar rather than actual ambiguity. The former is, well, anything looks wrong if you tell yourself it does.

[jackfirecat]

"60's, 70's, and 80's" is another example which old style guides would have said was correct*, but in modern useage is increasingly seen as incorrect - and I agree with you that this is a good thing. (and I put the Oxford comma in! couldn't help myself.)

* I assert, but don't have one to quote.

[specialknives]

I have also seen style guides that are happy with 60's, 70's and 80's.

[specialknives]

Ooh, bad bullet stem sk.