• glimse@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    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.

    • Beanie@programming.dev
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      29 days ago

      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@sh.itjust.works
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        29 days ago

        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.”