Date: 24 Jan 2002 14:37:51 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: All caps and plural Message-ID: <0v3d0v8jeo.d0v@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net> References: <20020124204345.A4101@schweikhardt.net>
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Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net> 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".
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