Grammar girl here. A couple of weeks ago, Victoria's Secret released a new ad for a line of

underwear with the brand name Body. The ad says you've never seen bodies like this before.

Bodies with an apostrophe to make it plural. People have been writing to me about it every

day since, so today we'll talk about the proper way to use an apostrophe to form a plural,

and how the writers at Victoria's Secret could have solved their particular problem.

Here's the problem that Victoria's Secret writers faced. Body is a brand name, which

makes it a proper noun like any other name. But body is also a word, a common noun that

everyone knows. It presents them with a great opportunity to make a play on words, which

they did in the ad. You've never seen bodies like this before. But they couldn't make

body plural the way you'd make the common noun plural, B-O-D-I-E-S, because then it's

not their brand name anymore. They needed to preserve B-O-D-Y, the brand name. But it appears

they didn't know how to make the brand name plural. Regular listeners will know the answer

because it's similar to the problem I talked about a couple of months ago, making brand

names that end in numbers, plural. You simply add S to the end, just as you would for

a person's name. You have three Williams in your class and four Emily's, and Victoria's

Secret is showing off their bodies. None of those take apostrophes. Regular people as

well as marketing writers are confused about more than just names when it comes to apostrophes

and plurals, though. Yesterday, someone on Twitter asked me whether he should use an

apostrophe when shortening the word professionals to prose. The short answer is no because although

prose casual, it's recognized as a word in its own right. And since it's a regular

old noun, you make it plural the same way you'd make any other common noun plural. In this

case, just add S, no apostrophe, prose, PROS. The longer answer is that it's not a completely

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