Plural Acronyms - Grave Accent

Ever put a CD into your DVD player? Email QA for a TPS report on UAT for the TTP project? Submit PII over a secure WIFI network using PKE over WEP? These are called acronyms; our entire language is riddled with them, and a new one seems to pop up every day.

Generally they're both useful and easy to apply, except in one particular situation, which is the subject of this blog post: the plural form.

Let's assume that the acronym you're using is a noun (recall: that's a person, place, or thing :), and you have greater than one of said noun. What is the correct grammatical representation?

For example, let's say that you bought three albums in the form of compact discs: one Forever Changes CD by Arthur Lee and Love, one Master of Reality CD by Black Sabbath, and one Rush CD by Rush (which happen to be three of my favorites--how I miss the days of albums!). You are now the proud owner of three compact discs, or three CD-ees?.

How do we pluralize this little linguistical phenomena?

1. Use an apostrophe

The old-school way of pluralizing an acronym is to use an apostrophe. When I was in middle school, my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Weis, told me that the following was correct:

--> I own over 500 CD's

This seems a bit, well, weird. An apostrophe-s is normally used as a possessive or a contraction. As a possessive you might say, "That is Jim's hat;" as a contraction, "He's got great taste in hats."

2. Append an "s"

The new-school answer is to append a solitary "s" to the acronym, like so:

--> I own over 500 CDs

This is equally weird, for a different reason: Those capital letters mixed with that lower-case "s" looks like a camel-case gone wrong. Phonetically speaking, "CD" is normal pronounced "cee-dee," and there's a temptation here to say "cee-dee-ess," when we really want "cee-dees."

Additionally, if an acronym ends a vowel, it's unclear whether it's a pluralized acronym, or a typo. For example, imagine the Housing Authority abbreviated as "HA." We thus have:

--> Nationwide HAs reporting problems.

Is this the word "Has" with a typo? The intended meaning is that Housing Authorities, nationwide, are reporting problems, but this could also be read that something nationwide "Has" reporting problems.

In light of these observations, I hereby propose use of the grave accent to pluralize acronyms:

--> I own over 500 CD`s

The grave accent--despite being conveniently located on the upper-left of a standard English keyboard, has little (if any) use in the English language. Elsewhere, such as in Portuguese, it enjoys a more prominent role; however, here in English, it is in a sad state of disuse. If interested, check the wiki page for "grave accent."

Anyway, IMNSHO, the grave accent is a perfect fit for pluralizing abbreviations. It neatly sidesteps both of the above problems, while clearly conveying the intended meaning: pluralization!

OMG. WTH? LOL!

Keith Miklas ~kjm~