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Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Much ado about the apostrophy

While reviewing a technical document, I ran across blatant usage of the apostrophy to pluralise all acronyms. I've always believed that acronyms should not be pluralized with the ' character. (That comes from learning English the Queen's way, rather than Bush's way.) Unfortunately, most engineers insist on writing RAM's and not RAMs, or MLA's and not MLAs.

So I decided to so some research on the net to find out about this "issue". And ran across tons of discussions and material on the correct usage of the apostrophe.

One of the best discussions forums on this topic can be found here in Mediawhore. An excellent and comprehensive journal on the Plural Noun Forms is available here by Webster.

And by far, the best comment on this controversy was this image
from AngryFlower.com. Its hilarious. And while you are it, do check out the Angry Flower website. Its pretty good.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey hawkeye, great blog .. how about pluralizing indivudual letters? onethinks it's okay to use apostrophes there ..

Nimbus said...

Ah thank you! Warmed the cockles of my heart so see someone rant about this! Angry flower was neat!

Although I will admit I have been guilty of confusing its and it's for a long time, and have only lately mended my ways :| *gulp*