Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.
It’s incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.
That’s half-right. Upper-case letters aren’t pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of ‘R’ is ‘Rs’ but the plural of ‘r’ is ‘r’s’.) With numbers (written as ‘123’) it’s optional - IIRC, it’s more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they’re written in all caps. I’m not sure what you mean by decades.
I absolutely love that there’s a group called the Apostrophe Protection Society. Is there something like that for the Oxford Comma? I’d gladly join them!
Because otherwise if you have too many small letters in a row it stops looking like a plural and more like a misspelled word. Because capitalization differences you can make more sense of As but not so much as.
English is a filthy gutter language and deserves to be wielded as such. It does some of its best work in the mud and dirt behind seedy boozestablishments.
Copilot may be a stupid LLM but the human in the screenshot used an apostrophe to pluralize which, in my opinion, is an even more egregious offense.
It’s incorrect to pluralizing letters, numbers, acronyms, or decades with apostrophes in English. I will now pass the pedant stick to the next person in line.
That’s half-right. Upper-case letters aren’t pluralised with apostrophes but lower-case letters are. (So the plural of ‘R’ is ‘Rs’ but the plural of ‘r’ is ‘r’s’.) With numbers (written as ‘123’) it’s optional - IIRC, it’s more popular in Britain to pluralise with apostrophes and more popular in America to pluralise without. (And of course numbers written as words are never pluralised with apostrophes.) Acronyms are indeed not pluralised with apostrophes if they’re written in all caps. I’m not sure what you mean by decades.
By decades they meant “the 1970s” or “the 60s”
I don’t know if we can rely on British popularity, given y’all’s prevalence of the “greengrocer’s apostrophe.”
Never heard of the greengrocer’s apostrophe so I looked it up. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-greengrocers-apostrophe-1690826
I absolutely love that there’s a group called the Apostrophe Protection Society. Is there something like that for the Oxford Comma? I’d gladly join them!
Why use for lowercase?
Because otherwise if you have too many small letters in a row it stops looking like a plural and more like a misspelled word. Because capitalization differences you can make more sense of As but not so much as.
That looks like an oddly capitalised “as”
That really gives the reason it’s acceptable to use apostrophes when pluralising that sort of case
Prescriptivist much?
English is a filthy gutter language and deserves to be wielded as such. It does some of its best work in the mud and dirt behind seedy boozestablishments.
I salute your pedantry.