Programmer Humor

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It must be a silent R (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 3 weeks ago (21 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

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.

[–] Mouselemming 17 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh right - that would be the same category as numbers then. (Looked it up out of curiosity: using apostrophes isn't incorrect, but it seems to be an older/less formal way of pluralising them.)