Over the years, as a matter of courtesy, my personal policy has been to avoid criticizing the English usage of fellow newspaper columnists. Since you asked for advice about them and they weren't initiated by me, however, I'll make an exception with respect to your two grammar questions.
Here's the material you quoted from the columnist's piece:
A hundred million thank you's to Conchita Carpio Morales and Albert del Rosario. For taking up the cudgels for more than a hundred million Filipinos who have stood helplessly by as China made inroads into Philippine territory and sovereignty over the past 20 or so years.
IMAGE CREDIT (LEFT): GIPHY.COMMy take on them:1. The prevailing usage is to pluralize "Thank you" by just appending the letter "s" to it, like this:
"Thank yous." That columnist's use of the apostrophe-"s" to pluralize the phrase makes it seem like she meant it to be the possessive of the singular form of that phrase as the subject, as in "
Your hundred million thank you's vaulting effusiveness is greatly appreciated." I must acknowledge though that to the uninitiated, "Thank you" pluralized as
"Thank yous" does have a strange, bewildering look. To attenuate that strangeness, some users put a hyphen between the two words as follows:
"Thank-yous." This, in fact, is the tact followed by the
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, hyphenating “thank-you” in this plural example it offered: “said their
thank-yous and departed.”
2. As to this question of yours about that columnist's prose style: "Couldn't the whole paragraph be one sentence instead of two? In elementary we were taught that [there should be] at least 3 to 8 sentences in a paragraph," I'm afraid that both of the premises you cited have no basis in prose composition at all. A paragraph can consist of any number of sentences, and it's really no business of anybody to dictate or restrict a writer in this fundamental writing aspect. And I must say that the elementary schoolteacher who taught you that "there [should be] at least 3 to 8 sentences in a paragraph" was terribly misguided in giving that advice.
With respect to that specific passage from the columnist's piece though, I do think that it's not a very desirable model of sentence construction and prose composition. Owing to poor punctuation, both sentences are jarringly incomplete in thought and are hanging precariously. Self-editing or perhaps a good copyeditor could have done wonders to that passage, but so as not to exacerbate matters, I will not attempt to do that here. I think any writer with a good grounding in English grammar and usage can do wonders to improve that iffy prose construction.
Poll