There was a short chorus of yes's and hi's. I have this sentence but I think it may be wrong, in fact, I'm pretty sure it is. Any ideas? I think 'yeses' is correct, but for 'hi' ...
I would just change it to 'hellos'. Please don't use the apostrophe to denote plurality. It's just so grammatically wrong! Alternatively, you could try the verb alternative: "a flurry of affirmative nods and quick greetings," etc.
Just substitute 'yes' and 'hi' for something else. For example: "There was a short chorus of affirmations and greetings."
I would have it: There was a short chorus of yeses and "hi"s. "Hi" in quotes because I think of it as a bit more informal. In fact after googling for a minute, I see that it's actually an interjection and therefore has no plural--which to me means the quotes are even more necessary, since you're essentially making up a word.
Depends on what you're doing. If you're talking about the word yes and no (or whatever word, like in a crit), you should use the 's-plural. It does exist. It shows up on acronyms ending in S and on literal words. He wrote ten yes's on that paper. She got four A's and two B's. Auto Security is expanding their company. AS's are everywhere! I like that last one. . . haha. That's why the S-ending acronyms get those, to avoid catastrophe. But know that simple abbreviations just get an S: e.g., DVDs. If you're just pluralizing a thing, which your sentence seems to be doing, then there is a dictionary plural you use. And yeah, it usually looks odd. There was a short chorus of yeses and ayes. I think you meant aye? As in old school 'yes,' ahoy matey, aye aye captain. Right? I have seen some words that don't pluralize. 'As' comes to mind. I think (someone's going to attack me on this) that it uses an apostrophe-s in that rare, rare case. I really feel I read this somewhere before, but I can't remember if that was from a real authority or what. I have a suspicion that 'hi' is in the same boat. Whatever you append to it breaks its reading. It may be in the same rare club as "do's and don'ts." (Notice the 's-plural.) That's how AP writes it. Chicago style is "dos and don'ts" which seems to be saying something about early operating systems, or maybe it's speaking Spanish. I don't know. Your example though is just simple plurals, but know the tricky style rules are out there. (Ask me about the scourge of the English language, the double apostrophe! Hated, shunned, the rule is to not use the rule and write around it.)
I've seen "yeses" and "noes" in various places. (Note that the plural of a noun ending in "o" usually -- but not always -- takes an "es" rather than a simple "s" ... potatoes, tomatoes, etc.) "Hi" is a different sort of thing because you have some poor choices: "his" is already earmarked as the possessive of "he" while "hies" is a form of the verb "hie." So I think you're probably stuck with recasting the sentence entirely.
According to isplural, the apostrophe is used for some plurals: ’s Rules We add ’s when making letters plural. example: Do you know your ABC’s? example: I got all A’s. We add ’s when creating the plural of a word that refers to itself. example: You have too many and’s in this sentence. Acronym Rules Acronyms become plural by adding an s. examples: URLs, BRBs, RFPs, PMs, BFs, GFs Acronyms ending with –s need ’s to be plural. example: SOS’s, OS’s, GLASS’s Source: "Plural Rules" isPlural.com. is Plural, n.d. Web. 01 May 2017. ETA isplural offers "yeses" and "noes" as well. I see nothing wrong with using the apostrophe for pluralizing yes, no, and hi.
If you're talking about lots of people saying 'yes' and 'hi', then you can make life easier for yourself by treating those words as dialogue: It may be a little bit rule-bendy, but I'd argue that it's not nearly as bad as apostrophe pluralisations, which look terrible even when they're technically excused by necessity. My rule is that when a line looks awkward even in its technically correct form, I reword it to get myself out of that corner. You probably want something that means the same thing though: it's more vivid if we're hearing 'yes' and 'hi' specifically rather than 'affirmations and greetings' as has been suggested, which shifts both the tone and the meaning. I'd write something like: (Although that changes the implications of the sentence. If you don't want it to be everyone speaking, or if, say, you have a POV character who's a bit too distracted to notice how many people exactly are contributing to the chorus, etc., you might want to look for a different way to write that. Plus my use of 'terse' is a specific interpretation of 'short' that you can disregard; it might have the wrong tone for you, although I'd argue that a more specific word like this is more interesting.) Basically, if your wording is forcing you to use an apostrophe to differentiate 'hi' from 'his', we can go back and forth all day about that being allowed or advised against, but in the end writing it either way is awkward as hell, so you should rearrange the sentence to find an option that you don't have to pull out a style guide to defend. Something that just looks right.
What does this even mean? 1/ Who talks about ABC in the plural? If I ask somebody if they know their ABC, why would I want to pluralize it? How many ABCs are there to know? 2/ How is and referring to itself in the example sentence? Not a style guide I'd pull out to defend anything I wrote. I'm with @truthbeckons ; if it looks ugly, rewrite it until it doesn't.
Damn. Trickier than I had imagined. Four people are involved in a phone call. The phone is on speaker. The MC, who is calling, asks, "Is everyone there?" There was a short... Looks like the sentence has to go in its present form. I knew it was wrong when I wrote it. I decided to catch it an edit. When I got to it it was 'hi' that floored me. Thanks all.
Take a guess. "Know your ABC's" gives me 68,000 results on Google. So, to answer your first question here, lots of people. I would speculate that it is pluralized conventionally. ABC is just three letters. Forming a plural clarifies that it refers to all the letters. Also, it's exactly as described in the American Heritage College Dictionary of the English Language, with apostrophe. There is one set of ABC's to know, consisting of 26 letters. Shadowfax, I've seen it written and heard it this way from many people for, like, forty years. By being the autological object of the verb have. It's such a nonissue, I wouldn't defend it in the first place. (ETA if it was my manuscript) Jordan Penn also describes the use accordingly: http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/apostrophe.html
Stuff like this amuses me. It's like showing proof of alien life. Plural apostrophe, LOL. But yeah, write around it when you can. It is weird. For apostrophe-S possessive, linguists think it either came from an elision of "his": Those are my lord his lands. ==> Those are my lord's lands. Or it came from the Old English habit of adding -es to show possession: Those are my lordes lands --> Those are my lord's lands. So you're not actually adding an S for possessives, you're chopping a vowel.
I don't see why. We know apostrophes exist. It's more like proving how aliens live their lives under a very specific and rare circumstance. But since we don't know if they exist, then this is wrong. If we were using Old English, maybe. But I only ever use modern English and I do not say This is my landlord her apartment. So, I'm not chopping anything.
