I notice in the original post Chas called it "the thing that gets you a job". If only. Although to be fair, that was seven years ago...

I just received this in an e(-)mail. This matter is now surely resolved once and for all:

Your email has been received and a member of our Team will review it and reply accordingly. If you have any questions about your email please reply to this e-mail, as any additional comments will be added and keep a clear audit log. Please don’t send a completely new e-mail or you will create a new job...

Erica,

Yes, my poor attempt at one at least.

Scyllacat:
"But in speech, it's ordinary, common idiom, nothing to worry about."
I totally agree. I live in New Zealand but am originally from the UK. In both countries you frequently hear "I've got", which is (in my opinion) completely interchangeable with "I have".

Jim:
"At the very least, all “have got” is is four more keys typed with no change in meaning."
I don't buy this argument. For instance there exist in English the words "huge", "massive", "gigantic", "enormous" and "colossal". They all basically mean the same thing, namely "very big". Would you suggest we only ever use "huge" because it's shorter than the alternatives? In English there are often many ways of expressing the same concept; I think that's a good thing.

Angie: "A's, B's, C's is wrong. So is 1's 2's, 3's. Or 40's (for age group) and 80's (for decade)."

I think it's far less black and white than you suppose. Would you really write "there are two Is and two Us in the word ridiculous"? Or "there are two is and two us..."? The second version in particular looks, well, ridiculous.

What about changeable sign boards that come with upper-case letters and punctuation but no lower case? I think "HALF-PRICE CD'S" looks better than "HALF-PRICE CDS". If I was walking or driving past I might wonder what a CDS is.

Sometimes apostrophes for plurals can provide clarity, and in any case I think writing A's and B's is considerably less wrong than writing banana's or avocado's.

Regarding the actual question, I'd say that either "do's and don'ts" or "dos and don'ts" is fine. Or even DOs and DON'Ts. I'd steer clear of don't's which looks like apostrophe overkill.

Jim: I'm not sure about your logic.
What about "I have a car" (present) and "I bought a car" (past)? You can certainly say "I have bought a car". As cnelsonrepublic says, "have" is an auxiliary verb.

In short, "have got" is perfectly good English.

Crashdummy: Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense now. However I'd say (for me) that emphasizing the "d" is something I'd have to do consciously. That's because "tex" (which, phonetically, is "teks") ends in an unvoiced sound, which naturally makes me pronounce the "d" as "t", just like I would in "vexed" or "faxed".

Here's my take on it:

First choice: résumé.
Second choice: resume.
Distant third choice: resumé.

I totally disagree with austin_brian's post of 6th Feb 2010: I think that *one* accent looks like you don't know what you're doing to anyone who knows French.

Blunderdownunder: "Also if it transpires that we must use a diacritic then can it be only 1 because two in one word just seems like too much work." You mean like pâté (which, like résumé, looks identical to another word if you leave off the accents)? Or déjà vu?

I write "any time" as two separate words, but maybe that's just me.
I hope we never go down the German route of mashingwordstogetherlikethis, but you did say "sensible", which imo excludes that :)

Crashdummy: You describe your pronunciation of the past tense as "text'd" but say it only has one syllable. What do you mean by this exactly? How does this differ from just "text"?

"I can't think of other similar words which would change from a one syllable sound for the present to a two syllable sound for the past."

There are heaps of verbs that do this: rest-ed, wait-ed, post-ed, hand-ed, end-ed, ...
In fact I'd go as far as to say that any one-syllable verb ending in "d" or "t" becomes a two-syllable word in the past tense, as long as it's a regular past tense with the -ed ending.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.