Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:43:45 +0100 From: Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net> To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: All caps and plural Message-ID: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net>
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Dear *,
[I'm not a native English speaker, so take this with a grain of salt].
Often I encounter documentation (mostly man pages) where the plural of
some capitalized word or acronym is made by appending an apostrophe
followed by s. E.g. tr(1) has
The tr utility ... stripped NUL's from its input stream.
and sed(1) has
Interpret regular expressions as extended (modern) regular
expressions rather than basic regular expressions (BRE's).
I've been taught that apostrophe + s indicates possession and plural is
formed by appending an s (except for the usual exceptions like women etc).
So I rather expect NULs and BREs to be correct. There's also the case of
abbreviations in lower case, like uids and gids vs uid's and gid's.
The documentation has undergone a few spelling sweeps for consistency in
the past (CD-ROM comes to mind). Does anyone have a word on how to deal
with plurals of acronyms and abbreviations? Or am I just anal? :-)
Regards,
Jens
--
Jens Schweikhardt http://www.schweikhardt.net/
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
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