How would one. . .?

Need some help here. Would this punctuation be proper? He would have to crawl back to Iowa to a chous of, "I told you so"s.

Probably told you so's for the sake of clarity.

You meant chorus, right?

robertreams said:

Need some help here. Would this punctuation be proper? He would have to crawl back to Iowa to a chous of, "I told you so"s.

Click to expand...

I agree with LV - I think you could leave out the quotation marks since you're only talking about hypothetical speech - I certainly wouldn't put the pluralising "s" on the other side of quotation marks. [not sure what the actual grammatical term is - sorry] In any case it would be a chorus of "I told you so" surely? for the same reason the Hallelujah Chorus isn't in the plural form.

I think that getting this exactly right is less important than the smooth flow of the narrative. I might be wrong about that too. just my two penn'orth.

I'd suggest the following:

He would have to crawl back to Iowa to a chorus of "I told you so's."

He would have to crawl back to Iowa to a chorus of, I told you so's.

Like Bert said, I'd worry less about what's grammatically correct and more about what reads better.

I-Told-You-Sos according to The Washington Post.