From owner-freebsd-doc Thu Jan 24 14:34:37 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from lists.blarg.net (lists.blarg.net [206.124.128.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B93DF37B402 for ; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:34:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from thig.blarg.net (thig.blarg.net [206.124.128.18]) by lists.blarg.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0274DBDE1; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:34:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost.localdomain ([206.124.139.115]) by thig.blarg.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA01977; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:34:30 -0800 Received: (from jojo@localhost) by localhost.localdomain (8.11.6/8.11.3) id g0OMbpj02867; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:37:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from swear@blarg.net) To: Jens Schweikhardt Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: All caps and plural References: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net> From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Date: 24 Jan 2002 14:37:51 -0800 In-Reply-To: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net> Message-ID: <0v3d0v8jeo.d0v@localhost.localdomain> Lines: 19 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii 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 Jens Schweikhardt writes: > 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. I thought the form with apostrophe was the only proper form for a couple of decades, but even my old dictionary makes it sort of optional, and many more trendy types prefer to never use it. Using it only on lower case seems a good compromise as it does help readability in that place. AHD from 1973: Terms made up of single letters or numbers, or groups of letters or numbers, are made plural by the addition of "'s" or "s", as "two R's" (or "Rs"), "two 6's" (or "6s"), "GI's" (or "GIs"), "the 1930's" (or "1930s"). The "'s" form is usually used for lower-case letters: "two t's". To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message