According to the New York Times Style Guide, the times chooses to use an apostrophe when making the plural of an acronym (see my Nov 30 entry) because not doing to would make their all-capital letter headlines confusing. So to avoid this, which rarely occurs compared to how often it does in the text of their stories, they choose to use the apostrophe (DVD’s, 1960′s, CEO’s) when no possessive exists. Why not just place a lower-case s in the headline? Instead, the NYT editors are probably responsible for the proliferation of misplaced apostrophes in written American English.
