From owner-freebsd-doc Thu Jan 24 12:19:42 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from bremen.shuttle.de (bremen.shuttle.de [194.95.249.251]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CA2EE37B402 for ; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 12:19:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from bremen.shuttle.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by bremen.shuttle.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C55A17DDB for ; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 21:19:37 +0100 (CET) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by bremen.shuttle.de (8.12.1/8.12.1/Debian -5) with UUCP id g0OKJbwH010234 for freebsd-doc@freebsd.org; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 21:19:37 +0100 Received: (from schweikh@localhost) by hal9000.schweikhardt.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) id g0OJhjn05020 for freebsd-doc@freebsd.org; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:43:45 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from schweikh) Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:43:45 +0100 From: Jens Schweikhardt To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: All caps and plural Message-ID: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message