On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 08:55 AM, ravi wrote:
> i am quite guilty of this stuff myself, so here's my defense: there is a
> bit of a difference isn't there between "her parent's went to church"
> and "the cisco's are down again". the former mistake (because i do not
> do it ;-)) is eggregious. the latter is a result of satisfying both
> laziness and readability. "the ciscos are down again" is a bit difficult
> to parse. i should write "the cisco routers are down again", but being
> too lazy to do that, i instead opt for adding the incorrect apostrophe
> in the interest of readability.
>
i'm afraid i have to disagree, here. -'s is never a correct formation of the plural, even with proper nouns or abbreviations (CDs, not CD's; 70s, not 70's). i know it's tempting, and it took me a while to get over, in part because goofball ex-usenet folks like me (and apparently ravi ;-) never capitalize anything, so you wind up with "i bought some cds" or "the ciscos are down," which can be confusing. what i usually do is actually capitalize things like that to try to avoid confusion, even if it means i have to hit the shift key. :-)
http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/engl_126/word.htm
however, there are times when -s is appropriate for a possessive, as for instance "its" (where "it's" = "it is"). http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/its.html
now none of this means that people will magically stop doing it or that it's a moral failing, but it is incorrect. j