It really bugs me when an apostrophe is inserted before the ‘s’ when words are pluralised (eg two bandage’s were found). The amount of so-called intelligent people who make this basic error is incredible.
I have recently come across words though like P60 where an apostrophe is inserted after the word when it is pluralised (eg two P60’s were found). There are other examples of this as well.
Is this proper English? I mean it is not indicating ownership nor does the word ‘is’ come after P60.
I know that there are one or two pedantic grammar heads on here who could answer this.
[quote=“farmerinthecity”]It really bugs me when an apostrophe is inserted before the ‘s’ when words are pluralised (eg two bandage’s were found). The amount of so-called intelligent people who make this basic error is incredible.
I have recently come across words though like P60 where an apostrophe is inserted after the word when it is pluralised (eg two P60’s were found). There are other examples of this as well.
Is this proper English? I mean it is not indicating ownership nor does the word ‘is’ come after P60.
I know that there are one or two pedantic grammar heads on here who could answer this.[/quote]
The P60’s thing - it’s not a rule but it’s fairly standard writing now to use apostrophes after letters and numbers to avoid confusion. It’s used more with P60’s than P45s because of 0 looking like O.
Not wound up at all. It was more of a question (sad as it may seem) as I had noticed it a few times now.
Part of my work involves writing reports which contain a lot of such examples so thought I would throw it out here to make sure that I was doing it correctly.
I knew that Rock (or Bandage) would know as well.
I’ll go with the apostrophe so as ‘not to cause confusion’. Pity that the powers be won’t be able to figure out the rest of the report but at least they’ll know I was pluralising P60.
[quote=“farmerinthecity”]In the case of pluralising words there should never be an apostrophe before the s. Seemingly apart from words such as P60 and the likes (two P60’s).
I hope for your sake that you knew that - well the first part anyway.[/quote]
I did but I always thought putting an ’ after an S always looked wrong though. Even MS Word seems to get this rule mixed up a lot of the time as well.
yeah it’s annoying farmer. I see it all the time at work
fee’s
ladie’s
purpose’s
Some people think that people who worry about this stuff are sad bastards. In reality anyone who spends 13 years in school and can’t spell or punctuate properly has nothing to be proud of and deserves the moniker of ‘sad bastard’ themselves.
Rightly or wrongly, I would never put it after a plural noun, be it numbers or letters. P60s looks alright to me. I mean, what the fuck is a P6O? How the fuck could you mistake P60s for P6Os when P6Os don’t even fucking exist.
An Apostrophe after an ‘s’ occurs when you’re using plurals, e.g. the ladies’ toilets, the lads’ (more than one person) cars etc. If it’s singular then it would the lad’s car. Glad to be of assistance.
I have said this on here before I think, I got an A in hoons english and I know not one of these grammatical rules. I dont ever remember being taught grammar as a matter of fact.
