I won’t lie to you. Not every mailbag is a winner. But sometimes, we don’t get a lot of submissions. And, you know, it’s not every week where someone’s ex-girlfriend gets murdered. But I try to do my best with what I’m given, and there are some moderately interesting topics raised this week, so please: read on. I just don’t want to oversell anything.
We start things off this week with a positively THRILLING discussion about grammar. This is an actual email exchange, and not my usual style of interrupting a single narrative.
Caveman,
I appreciate your grammar Nazism, as it’s sorely needed and probably not oft received among the core KSK readership. On that note, however, I wanted to amend your comment last week [actually, it was two weeks ago - Ed.] about how one should never use an apostrophe to pluralize. Using an apostrophe is actually the traditional correct way to pluralize acronyms (however, there is debate on this topic). For example, the correct plural of ATM is ATM’s.
That’s all. No fantasy or sex questions for now.
Disagree. ATMs is smoother, cleaner and impossible to confuse as the possessive. “This ATM’s screen is cracked.”
The one true exception — which, in fairness, I didn’t mention in the previous mailbag — is individual letters. “How many S’s are in ‘Mississippi’?”
Well I’m not gonna get into a slappy bitch-fight over this, but I’m just telling you that the style guides I’ve been required to use in school and now professionally (I’m a lawyer, insert offensive remark here, though as a Vikings fan it’s very difficult to hurt me) all mandate apostrophes when pluralizing acronyms. That wikipedia article I linked to says one can go both ways.
I personally agree with you that it makes more sense to not use apostrophes, for the reasons you stated, but it also makes more sense to not put two spaces after periods (especially if you want to avoid the wrath of Slate’s Farhad Manjoo), yet the firm I work for requires it anyway.
Carry on.
The fact that the firm you work for requires two spaces after sentences should effectively negate any argument that what they mandate is correct or accepted, since two spaces is redundant in this brave new world of intelligent typefaces.
There will always be small differences in style guides — should TV shows be in italics or quotes? — but in trivial matters like this I go to the single most important quote from Strunk & White: “Clarity, clarity, clarity.” I save my apostrophes for the possessive, and my readers will never be confused by their use.
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That was fun, right? Now let’s talk sex and football.
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