I don't know of any such argument. Do you have a source? These are all acronyms, and should be upper-case all the time if I'm not mistaken.
The company's name is IBM, not ibm (International Business Machines). The league is NBA, not nba. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it shouldn't appear as ftp. Same goes to HTTP and HTTPS, although based on the site below, you may be able to write HTTPS's to denote plural form (because it ends with S) See "Plurals and Apostrophes" here: http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/plurals.htm (Webster). Put "DVD's" or "CD's" in Word. It'll report it as a grammar error. -RoNNY On 7/1/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mike Jackson wrote: > >> They don't use it while saying "The DVD's cover is beautiful". > >> (Right) They use it like this: "I bought 20 DVD's". (Wrong) > >> > >> If I'm not mistaken, the first example above is not an abbreviation, > >> but possessive form. > > > > Yes, I know, but it seems people *think* that an abbreviation > > requires an apostrophe between it and a pluralizing s, whereas a > > complete word (like "airplane" in your previous example) would not. > > They're wrong, of course, but that seems to be the "logic" behind it. > > There is an argument for this in the case of lowercase acronyms, to avoid > ambiguity: > > "There were 20 inbound connections on three protocols: > Five ftp's, 12 http's, and three https's. > > -- > Matthew.van.Eerde (at) hbinc.com 805.964.4554 x902 > Hispanic Business Inc./HireDiversity.com Software Engineer > perl -e"map{y/a-z/l-za-k/;print}shift" "Jjhi pcdiwtg Ptga wprztg," >
