Is it just me, or is the nickname for the Oakland A's an incorrect use of the apostrophe?

Yes, but try telling them that.

Maybe it’s a contraction for “A is.”

Style guides vary on how to treat the plural of a letter of the alphabet. Some do actually prescribe it in situations like this: “I got all A’s and B’s.” This is similar to the treatment of numerals (e.g., “The binary system consists of all 1’s and 0’s”) and years (“Growing up in the 1960’s was a lot of fun.”)

[Edit] Apostrophes have uses other than to indicate ownership, and although it is a stretch in this case, you can argue the virtue of clarity over stylistic precision. “A’s and B’s” may be clear in context, but not just As and also not as (“Kierkegaard is spelled with two as”).

How would you pronounce “the Oakland As”?

yes, it implies ownership, not plurality.

The apostrophe in Ma’am is being used as alphabetical replacement.
A’s apostrophe is just replacing a lot of letters in Athletics

No. It’s a contraction for ass holes.

I hate the Oakland A’s. I’m a Giants fan.

I think you are correct. It should be the Oakland As.

Yes, it’s incorrect.

I have to agree with @fireside on this one. It is used as a replacement for “thletic” the same way that it replaces the “o” in the contraction don’t. Plus, taking away the apostrophe would make it indistinguishable from the conjunction “as.”

When you form the plural of single letters, you use apostrophes. “Mind your p’s and q’s.”

In that sense, the nickname for the Oakland A’s is correct.

you

@cwilbur: what style guide are you referencing?

It’s what I was taught in grammar school; the textbooks used were the Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition series.

You can also find mention of it in the Wikipedia article here, although it doesn’t cite specific style guides except to say that the Chicago Manual of Style only supports doing this in cases where it would be otherwise ambiguous.

Huh. CMS tells me only to use an apostrophe if it’s abbreviated with periods.

I don’t have any actual style guides conveniently located near me.

Well, not English style guides, anyway.

The rule I learned from Warriner’s was that the plural of letters was formed with an apostrophe—as in “Mind your P’s and Q’s.” That makes the Oakland A’s correct.

I’m willing to concede that other style manuals probably have other things to say on the matter, and I don’t think this is nearly as important as, say, the Oxford comma.

The Oxford comma is, I am sure, the literary world’s best-kept secret. I never heard of it until I joined fluther (and that tells you something, although I am not sure what).

@gailcalled: so long as you didn’t dedicate a book to your parents, Ayn Rand and God, you’re probably all set.

@cwilbur : ^^ Not to worry. My next book will be dedicated to Milo.

Ooh, I missed the OC^^.

@gailcalled it tells us that you don’t listen to Vampire Weekend. ;)

Small world: I was just having a “discussion” about the Serial Comma with my wife and son, who insist I’m wrong.

A style sheet or style guide records and establishes editorial decisions and judgment calls among acceptable alternatives for the sake of maintaining consistency within a given document or family of documents, usually intended for publication. Several, such as Chicago, are accepted as standard references and used by many publishers. Most publishers I have worked for (but not all) call for Chicago. By their nature, the judgment calls recorded in style guides could be called otherwise by a different editor or publisher.

If you got Bs and Cs, you might not need the apostrophe. But if you got As, you don’t want the word to be read as the adverb as. And if you got A’s and B’s, you would need the apostrophe with “B’s” for consistency with “A’s” so they they would be understood as symbols having the same kind of meaning.

The serial (Oxford) comma is also a matter of style. It’s one of the first things I check when I have to work under a new style sheet because in such matters I may constantly have to override my own established habit and practice in order to follow the publisher’s prescribed style.

@Jeruba; r as ea pe wuld say, xfrd.

What’s your take on apostrophes? Punctuation or something else (where they replace letters.)*******************************

Edit. That string of *s is Milo’s contribution.

@gailcalled, not sure what you’re asking. Do I think they’re punctuation?

“Or as Edgar Allan Poe would say,“Oxford.”

Yes about whether apostrophes are punctuation or some other-named usage.

@gailcalled, I’ve never even thought about that before. I guess I just classify as “punctuation” all the notational elements we use that are not literal or numeric symbols. Oh, wait. No, I don’t. An ampersand, percent sign, and crosshatch (“pound sign”) are not punctuation, and of course mathematical operators are not either. They’ve been termed “special characters” for computer purposes. Let me think.
...
<pondering>
...
Well, unlike an ampersand (and others), an apostrophe has no meaning at all when it stands alone. So it’s not exactly a symbol. It doesn’t have the same kind of operational value as a period or a quotation mark, whose meaning can be defined apart from context. And I don’t think it ever actually stands for or replaces letters. It can signify the omission of letters in some uses, but that is not the same thing.

What I am working up to here is I don’t know. I think perhaps it is sometimes a mark of punctuation and sometimes not, just as a period is sometimes a full stop and sometimes a decimal point. “Other-named usage” will do for me in the meantime.

Thanks, Gail. Now I have to go study on apostrophes. I wish you had asked me about apostrophe as a poetic device; I can tell you what that means.

I did get your -O string. :)

If we had a -G strin, I’d be ailcalled, I uess.

And oody, the ’ has its own private club: http://www.apostropheabuse.com/

ut, ut damned spt.