- From: Dennis E. Hamilton <infonuovo@email.com>
- Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 10:42:16 -0800
- To: "Boris Bokowski/OTT/OTI" <Boris_Bokowski@oti.com>
- Cc: <ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org>
At first I was surprised by the tendency to treat acronyms (whether pronounceable as words or not) as nouns with mixed-case plural forms. In alliance with this trend, I have been training myself to use the -s and not the -'s. Partly because the ODMA specification does that, and I have to live with it. I checked with a modest but prominent authority: 1. Form the plural of an acronym by adding an s with no apostrophe. E.g., URLs, GUIDs. 2. Form the plural of a single letter by adding an apostrophe and an s. The letter itself (but not the s) is in italic. (I have no idea where this came from. Sounds like a good reason to avoid having this case, especially when doing mathematics.) 3. Form the plural of a number by adding an s with no apostrophe. E.g., 1950s. This is from the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. O'Reilly uses the Chicago Manual of Style, and I don't know what that offers on this subject, but the DocBook book uses "DTDs." It looks like the author/editor of that book found many ways to avoid plurals by rewording. The O'Reilly style sheet lists -s forms in the default spellings for GUIs, URLs, and BHOs. I would say that, unless IETF has a specific style requirement for this, that the -s form is important. It allows us to speak of URLs and of a URL's something-or-other. - OT warning - - - - OT warning - Notice that whether you say "an URL" or "a URL" is more difficult, because it depends on how you pronounce "URL" and perhaps on your generation, like having the final period of a sentence inside an ending quotation. It's a yoo-are-ell, when it's not an oo-rl. I always want to put "an U..." in print, even though at one time it was considered that U with the yoo-sound, as in Univac, was not a case of the vowel rule. But my ear isn't trained that way, and "an Univac" sounds smoother to me. Sigh. I even say "an HTML document ..." a demonstration that the rule for articles is about pronunciation, not spelling, for me. How about you? Reverting to the previous modest authority, the following is on page 1 (Under Abbreviations and Acronyms): "Choose a preceding indefinite article ('a' or 'an') based on the acronym's pronunciation -- for example, 'an ANSI character set' or 'a WYSIWYG system.'" Notice that ANSI and WYSIWYG are initialisms, but they have also become acronyms as pronouncable words (though in some language yet to be named). The ever-modest style-guide authors managed to come up with examples that work for either approach to pronunciation, bless their hearts. -- Dennis -----Original Message----- From: ietf-dav-versioning-request@w3.org [mailto:ietf-dav-versioning-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Boris Bokowski/OTT/OTI Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 18:58 To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org Subject: Re: minor comments regarding 12.2 > > That's always a hard call. I have consistently used "URL's" instead > > of "URLs" in the document, since URLs can sometimes be confused as > > a four letter acronym. I could change this if anyone cares enough > > to support this change request (otherwise it's just 1-1, and the author > > wins all tied trivial formatting issues :-). > > I tend to use URLs. The 's form always means "possessive" to me, rather than > "plural". I second that. Seems like 2-1 to me , at least so far :-) Boris.
Received on Saturday, 10 February 2001 13:40:52 UTC