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Comment by hawkharris | Hacker News Reader

I thought Steve's post was insightful and well written. The article would be even better if the author made two small improvements to spelling and grammar:

1. "1960's" should be written as "1960s." It's incorrect to use an apostrophe. 2. Semicolons should separate complete, related sentences, not fragments such as "an hour from Stanford on the coast, but that hasn't helped."

I'm taking a moment to offer this feedback because I know that all good writers can benefit from constructive criticism. I look forward to reading more of the author's insightful posts.

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According to the New York Times style guide, official NYT style is to write 1960's for the plural. The motivation is that in all-caps headlines, 1960S is hard to read, so they used an apostrophe. For consistency, they used this in body text too. (They may have changed the style guide away from this recently, though.)

The larger point is that many grammar things I thought were matters of right and wrong are actually matters of style.

(Just sharing a random factoid stuck in my brain, not trying to start a grammar flame war.)

I believe I have used the apostrophe when writing 1960s, etc. Good to know the rule, even though I'll need to get used to no apostrophe looking right. Does the same rule apply when abbreviating 1960s as 60s. In this case, would an apostrophe go before the 6, thus '60s?

Apostrophe has two uses as far as I know... one is for elision ('60s indicates that "19" has been elided or omitted) and possession (The 1910s' greatest author was Franz Kafka)

The "grocer's apostrophe" or "grocers' apostrophe" is what's incorrectly added to the plural form like what you're describing, the short answer is yes. '60s not 60's.

Single quotes have another use. Which is to mark off quotations inside of quotations.

Technically speaking you use single quotes there, but not apostrophes. However I mention it because the quotation mark that you used is a single quote.

Thanks. My keyboard only has one apostrophe/single quote key, as I suspect most do, but I have been learning to use the compose key and I appreciate little details like that.

The apostrophe has three uses:

    To form possessives of nouns
    To show the omission of letters
    To indicate certain plurals of lowercase letters

Rules and examples (including the decade examples): http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

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