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Tom Green wondered: <<I'm having a back-and-forth with an engineer
about how to write more than one RPM.>>
By default, acronyms can inherently be either singular or plural, and
you'll see some acronyms with an added "s" to make the distinction
clear: one PC but several PCs, and so on. But units of measurement
receive special treatment: the unit is always expressed as a singular
acronym or abbreviation (i.e., no terminal "s"), and the only
indication of whether one or more of those units is being discussed
comes from the number that precedes "RPM".
You can explain this to your engineer by example: you'll never see "the
distance was 5 ms [or: 5 m's]" (where m = metre) in any scientific or
engineering document. The SI standard for units is that they do not
take an "s" in any case; "s" is reserved for the unit of time known as
the second. (See, for instance:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html)
Moreover, for "revolutions per minute", it's exceedingly rare to
discuss only a single (1) RPM. By default, this means the unit is
almost always plural.
Where it's necessary to distinguish between singular and plural and you
can't use numbers to do so (i.e., when the acronym is not a unit of
measurement), the most common style is to use a combination of articles
("a" for singular) and verb forms (singular versus plural) to make the
meaning clear. But you will occasionally see plurals formed using the
same rules used for any other English noun. Thus:
<<She wants to write, "RPM's." I freaked and said, "No, that would be
saying, it's the Rotation Per Minute's problem.">>
The most common style nowadays is to simply append the "s" with no
apostrophe to create a plural. However, the apostrophe has a long and
legimate history of use for forming plurals, as in phrases such as
"mind your P's and Q's" and "a list of do's and don'ts". In such
usages, there is no confusion that the meaning is intended to be
possessive, and that's why the apostrophe is allowed.
This stylistic device was traditionally adopted to avoid problems with
words such as "as": does this mean "more than one letter A", or the
word "as"? The Grammatical Powers That Be decided by consensus that
using the apostrophe to mean something other than the possessive was
justified by the increased clarity of meaning. You can undoubtedly find
this specific format in any good comprehensive style guide, but it's
not relevant justification for adding an "s" to a unit of measurement
such as RPM. The genre conventions overrule the grammatical in this
case. (Live by the rules of your audience!)
<<I also hate to apply the possessive to an inanimate object or a
company for example, "IBM's net worth." Is there a rule about that, or
is that just me?>>
It's not just you, but avoiding this form of possessive contradicts
many centuries of English usage: nowhere does it say that only living
things can possess something, and English would be a horribly stilted
language if you couldn't say "the mountain's shadow", "the perfume's
aroma", and so on. Although it's true that one must actually think
briefly about whether it's incorrect to personify the inanimate, the
only situation when that personification must reasonably be avoided is
when it misleads the reader. (You see this problem all the time in
discussing evolution... even scientists have been led astray.)
Where the result is not misleading, there's no good justification for
avoiding the apostrophe-s, and you won't find any rule against this in
most modern style guides. (I'm tempted to say _any_ modern guide, but I
suspect that some of the more anal-retentive guides out there, such as
APA, probably do proscribe this usage. <g>)
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