Ronny Nussbaum wrote: > > Matthew.van.Eerde wrote: >> 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. > > I don't know of any such argument. Do you have a source?
Well, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym The traditional style of pluralizing single letters with "'s" ("there are two Q's in that word") was naturally extended to acronyms when they were commonly written with periods, and is still preferred by some people for initialisms. It is, however, very common to inflect them like ordinary words; thus the usual plural of "CD" is "CDs," with "CD's" being reserved for the possessive. When an acronym is part of a computer function that is conventionally written in lowercase letters, it is common to use an apostrophe to pluralize or otherwise conjugate the token (in computer lingo, it is not uncommon to use the name of a computer program, format, or function, acronym or no, as a verb, e.g., "John tarred the files" or "John tar'ed the files" means that John used the program tar on the files to conglomerate them), resulting in sentences like "be sure to remove any extraneous dll's after the program finishes uninstalling." There's also a reference in the National 4-H Headquarters' style guide: http://www.national4-hheadquarters.gov/liaisons/Army_Acronyms.doc Though 4-H abjures the apostrophe, they do not that using the apostrophe is common practice. There's also a student that mandates the apostrophe: http://www.nova.edu/~stroudt/new_page_1.htm 17. Plural acronyms must have an apostrophe and lower case "s". Ex.: FP's This site allows both: http://www.free-definition.com/Abbreviation.html Whether to add an apostrophe for a plural: should one write CDs or CD's? The apostrophe is not needed grammatically but sometimes is added to make it clear that the s is not part of the abbreviation. -- 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,"
