the's

I don't know how to answer that.

I tend to agree with you- that's how I would probably write it, but there is no good reason for that, except maybe that "thes" looks wrong.

I would prefer to change the sentence so that the word "thes" was not required.

Thanks, Mc Tag.

I have to say, misuse of the apostrophe is one of my pet peeves!

The apostrophe has these uses:-

1. To denote posession: John's car, Bill's house, Italy's capital.

2. To indicate a contraction or missing letter. The commonest examples are the auxiliary verbs and the word 'not'. Thus I am becomes I'm and are not becomes aren't.

3. Plurals: In the solitary case of single lower case letters, it is preferable to use an apostrophe to avoid confusion, as in 'mind your p's and q's'. The use of the apostrophe in other plurals is a grave error, indicative of great ignorance.

4. Foreign Words: An apostrophe also appears in foreign words written in English, used to transcribe a curious pronunciation, the glottal stop: Qur'an, Hawai'i. The apostrophe in these cases is purely decorative, as the glottal stop is usually ignored by English speakers.

I could write one "the", two "the"s, I suppose, but I think it would be more elegant and less clumsy to talk about one or two occurrences of the definite article.

"the's" is illiterate.

A prescription to be sure, Contrex and a mighty confusing one at that. There's no reason given for not extending this idea to "avoid confusion" to "two/three/a million the's". If it works for p's and q's, it has to work for a couple of the's.

I'm not at all certain that a "the's" can be illiterate.