Spelling and punctuation of academic degree terms

I'm publishing an article shortly (if all goes well) about the history of the "J.D.," the law degree.  I've had to work out a system to refer to and punctuate the words for these degrees.  The bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees are difficult for a writer to pluralize and to make into possessives. This is primarily because those words end in  -'s.  I've worked out an itty-bitty style guide for them.  A style guide helps my style be, at least, consistent.  (Below, I follow the convention of using an asterisk to refer to a non-existent or incorrect form.

General remarks:

There are six ways to refer to degrees in a sentence in modern writing.  With:

• their letter abbreviations (B.A.), 
• the spelled out, English or Latin degree name along with the word "degree": bachelor of arts degree, the degree of master of arts, juris doctor degree
• the spelled out, English or Latin degree name without the word "degree"
• one of three possessive (or genitive) -case single words, with or without the word "degree": bachelor's or bachelor's degree, master's or master's degree, doctor's or doctor's degree
• using an -ate noun: baccalaureate (never *"bachelorate," apparently a non-word), doctorate or, rarely, masterate.  (The word "masterate" is listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as "chiefly N[ew] Z[ealand]," the only time I remember ever seeing it is in an American reference from the 1937 Proceedings of the American Association of Law Schools.) 
• using baccalaureate or doctorate as an adjective, immediately followed by the word "degree."

The Latin sources of the degrees have to be shown so I can emphasize that each degree is a singular noun.  The B.A. is the "Bachelor of Arts," a translation of the Latin A.B., "Artium Baccalaureus".  M.A., Master of Arts, is from A.M., "Artium Magister," and Ph.D., "doctor of philosophy," is "Philosophiae Doctor."  "Baccalaureus," "Magister" and "Doctor" are all singular, so the degrees should be single in English, too.  *"Bachelors," *"masters" and *"doctors" are incorrect.    The style guide:


1) Capitalization:

Abbreviations:
 
The abbreviations of the degrees are generally capitalized according to Latin-abbreviations rules: for instance, B.A., M.A., M.D., J.D.  There seem to be three types of three-letter abbreviations, which you need to be alert for.  The first has three capital letters and two periods, as LL.D. (legum doctor or doctor of laws) and LL.M. (legum magister or master of laws).  The second has two capitals and two periods, as in Ph.D. philosophiae doctor)) and M.Ed. (master's in education, abbreviated according to the Latin rule).  The third and final abbreviations have three capitals and three periods, and typically abbreviate English titles, as in M.P.H. (master's in public health).  Degrees with even more letters exist, and you can extrapolate from these rules.

Don't put a space after any intermediate period in these abbreviations.

Spelled-out degrees:

When used in general terms, as in I want to get a master's degree, or the bachelor of science, there is no capitalization. If you refer to specifically to the degree offered at a university, as one would in promotional materials, capitalization is permissible: Georgetown offers a Master of Laws (or Master of Laws degree) in Taxation.


2) Pluralization:

The easiest and best way to pluralize is to include the word "degree," as in B.A. degrees or bachelor's degrees.  If you are using the abbreviations, you may pluralize as follows: B.A.s, J.D.s, etc., with no apostrophe before the s. 

Do not try to pluralize the one-word forms bachelor's or master's.  There's just no way to do this comfortably.

3) Possessives:

It's easy to add -'s to the word "degree" (or -' to an existing plural) to make a possessive, as in the bachelor's degree's value is undoubted.  You can add -'s to abbreviations as well, i.e., the M.A.'s value or two M.A.s' value.

You almost certainly can't put the one-word degrees "bachelor's," "master's" or "doctor's" into the possessive, any more than you can pluralize them, because the spelling problem of doubling the apostrophe, or apostrophe-s, is too ungainly.


4) You can refer to individuals by the degrees they possess.

Individuals can be referred metonymically as a Ph.D. or a J.D., but it seems much less natural to say, for lower-level degrees, "my son is a B.A." You can also say for holders of doctorates Bob is a doctor of law or Bob is a doctor of philosophy.

You may say Bob has . . . or Bob earned . . . any of the degrees.

5) Punctuation at the end of a sentence.

At the end of a sentence, do not put an extra period after the final period of an abbreviation.

I hope this style guide helps you in your writing!

Pronouncing "-ough"

In standard English the word-ending "-ough" is pronounced in eight different ways in common English words:

1. /oh/ as in "though"
2. /aw/ as in "bought" or "ought"
3. /oo/ as in "through"
4. /ow/ as in "bough" or "slough" (this means a muddy ditch or miry hole)
5. /uff/ as in "enough" "slough" (a verb meaning to shed one's skin, or the related noun)
6. /off/ as in "cough"
7. /up/ as in "hiccough", although I would spell it "hiccup"
8. /uh/ as in some British pronunciations of "borough" and "thorough" (/buruh/ and /thuruh/, where Americas would end with /oh/)

There's a few others:

9. /ahhk/ or perhaps
10. /ahhg/: George G. Vasey's 1862 Classical English Spelling-Book suggests these two unusual ones for the dog called a "shough" (or "shock")--"These Curs are much set by with Ladys, who . . . trim of all the hair of their hinder parts."* There's no pronunciation for this word in my big dictionaries, but alternative spellings suggest two, reading as /shock/ or /showg/.

As well as "shough," a few more are suggested in Jeff Aronson's sidebar, "When I Use a Word, Ough Ough," British Medical Journal (July 20, 2002), p. 160:

11. /ug/ in "oughly," an archaic spelling of "ugly"

12. /ok/, in certain Scottish words like "hough" and "lough," and

13. /ookh/ (with the glottal ending of "loch" or "ach"), as in "sough" (in one of its homonyms, a rushing or murmuring sound) or "through-stane" (the stone or a slab over a tomb).

The Oxford English Dictionary often traces words with these spellings to Middle English or Old English words that ending in the letter ȝ or "yogh," that sounded like /y/ or something like the ending in Scottish "loch."

* Randle Holme, The academy of armory; or, A storehouse of armory and blazon · 1st edition, 1688

"Mirror," "reflect" and "reverse"

I stumbled across an interesting usage phenomenon with the verbs "to mirror" and "to reflect." Mirrors and reflections return the opposite of the original image or object--think of "mirror-writing" (writing from right to left, and forming letters backwards) or the evil Mirror Universe (Star Trek's counterpart of our own, which apparently is the "good" universe).  However, "to mirror" or "reflect" something mean being its identical copy or image. There's no change in polarity, as when you actually look in the mirror.  Maybe your left hand seems to be your right hand when you stand before a mirror in the real world; but when things are figuratively mirrored they go in the same direction. One of the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary is

1992    Economist 4 Jan. 54/3   McKinsey reckons a shortage of hard currency‥means that the east German car boom is unlikely to be mirrored anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

If a country in Eastern Europe were to mirror the German boom, its car production would also increase; but if you looked at a graph of the German boom in a mirror, production would of course seem to go in the direction of decrease.  This limited conception of what a mirror really does, copying but not reversing, seems very natural to me. The same phenomenon occurs when we use the word "reflect"--if trend or concept x reflects trend or concept y, it will move in the same direction as y.  To show movement in an opposite direction, we would say that x "reverses" y.  I might also use "inverts," "flips" or "spins"--but a "mirror" or "reflection" analogy would not be appropriate.  An ontological curiosity, for your delectation.