You do not use an apostrophe when forming plurals.
Just last evening I spotted a news story, posted on the web by a major news organization, describing a disturbance during a protest march: “Amid the cries and chaos, photographers were kicked, their camera’s tossed.” After seeing that sentence, my cookie’s were nearly tossed.
Now, apostrophizing the word cameras was obviously the result of typing error and subsequent editing error (or, perhaps, of pure
Bill Brohaugh
3S
editorial l-don’t-give-a-damn), and not ignorance of the language. Otherwise, both writer and editor would have standardized the sentence to refer to cry’s (or maybe even crie’s) and photographer’s, and, heck, why not refer to chao’s as a plural of a single instance of chao? (Also see page 148 for my discussion of kudo versus kudos, which might very well be resolved by creating the word kudo’s.)
I suggest that lackadaisical overuse of the apostrophe is fueled by an abundance of initialisms these days, as writers try to mind their P’s and Q’s. (No one is quite sure why we don’t watch, say, our J’s and X’s, but that’s another story.) In the case of this hoary phrase, minding your Ps and Qs (or worse yet, your ps and qs) is potentially confusing, especially if doing so involves crossing your ts and dotting your is. Dotting I’s is clearer than is dotting Is. But now everything seems to be reduced to initialisms: IMHO, TYVM, and following the pattern of crossing your P’s and dotting your Q’s, people regularly write of visiting MD’s and listening to DJ’s in the 1990’s. Here, the apostrophe is by fading convention a clarifier. But MD and even M.D. is a word in and of itself, so to make it plural, add S. We visit MDs. Better yet, use the actual phrase. (For more on this, see my rant about RBI as a plural on page 39.)
The same thinking applies to dates. We increasingly refer to the 1990s and not the 1990’s—and it gets especially confusing with dates when using an apostrophe to indicate contraction: We should refer to the ’90s, not the 90’s (and certainly not the ’90’s—one apostrophe to a customer, please!).
And now, returning to our cries and chaos, in case you were curious, the new’s organization that reported the major breaking story of tossing cameras was . . . CB’S.