Dos and don'ts? Or do's and don't's?

A recent headline in the New York Times caught my attention: “City Beekeepers: The Dos and Don’ts of Maintaining an Urban Hive.” The idea of keeping beehives in Manhattan is interesting, of course, but if you’re a word nerd like me, you’re probably also intrigued by “dos and don’ts.”

On the one hand, it looks funny. “Dos” looks like it should be pronounced as if it rhymes with “boss,” especially because an early PC operating system called DOS did rhyme with “boss.” But if you put an apostrophe in “do’s,” wouldn’t you have to do the same for “don’t’s,” giving it one apostrophe for the contraction then another to make it plural?

Weird as “dos and don’ts” looks, at least it’s logical in a system that says don’t use apostrophes to form plurals.

Yet if that headline had appeared in any of thousands of other newspapers in the country, it would have been written differently: do’s and don’ts. That’s right, lots of news outlets would use an apostrophe to make a plural out of “do” but they would not use an apostrophe to make “don’t” into a plural.

Why? Because the Associated Press Stylebook, which most newspapers follow, says to use “do’s and don’ts.”

Punctuation rules aren’t made to be broken. But they’re so flawed that sometimes you should break them anyway. That’s most true when it comes to apostrophes to form plurals. The basic rule is: don’t. One cat plus another cat isn’t two cat’s. It’s two cats. No apostrophe.

But it’s not always so easy. Say, for example, you want to talk about a student’s grades. Until recently, a lot of newspapers would have said, “Johnny gets mostly Bs and Cs, along with a few A’s.” The first two letters followed the no-apostrophe rule. But if you follow that rule for the letter A, you spell a word: “as.” So some editing styles made an exception for letters like “A” and “I.”

The biggest among them, AP, recently abandoned that system. Now, AP says, use apostrophes to form plurals of every letter: “Johnny gets mostly B’s and C’s, along with a few A’s.” It doesn’t align with apostrophe rules, but at least it’s less distracting.

The change puts AP’s rule for capital letters in line with their rule for lowercase letters, which has always been to use an apostrophe when forming a plural: “There are two p’s in Mississippi.” That apostrophe has always been the only way to make clear you’re talking about the letter P and not the combo PS.

Other times, instinct isn’t the best guide for knowing when an apostrophe can form a plural. Often, plurals that “look wrong” are right.  “We saw the emus at the zoo” could leave you wondering what an emus, presumably pronounced ee-muss, is. If you read “there are two Enzos in my class,” it might take you a moment to work out that it’s two people named Enzo. Ditto that for Aris and Lulus and Elis. My guess is that around 90% of people would write those plurals as emu’s, Enzo’s, Ari’s, Lulu’s and Eli’s.” But that would be a mistake. Just because a possessive S suggests a weird pronunciation doesn’t mean you can add an apostrophe.

Instinct also leads people to put apostrophes in plural numbers: “The band was popular in the 1990’s.” That, too, is wrong. It’s 1990s. Perhaps people who do that are thinking of the apostrophe that represents dropped numerals in “the ’90s.” But that’s a correct use of an apostrophe, unlike one before a plural S.

If you’re making a word or number plural and you’re tempted to add an apostrophe, add that to your list of don’ts, unless there’s a special rule that says it belongs on your list of do’s.

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