[LINK] grammar nazis
Ivan Trundle
ivan at itrundle.com
Thu Oct 26 15:38:18 AEST 2006
On 26/10/2006, at 3:01 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>
> On 2006 Oct 26, at 12:42 PM, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>> On 26/10/2006, at 11:54 AM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>>> This is for those interested in grammar out there: what do you
>>> think of this?
>>
>> Various style guides point out that clarity is the aim, and
>> without this, how would anyone write about the number of a's and
>> i's (the lower-case letters) in a sentence?
>
> 'a's and 'i's ? "a"s and "i"s? metalanguage is not always simple
> though.
No, it isn't - and the above construct is not as simple as the single
apostrophe example, and it's harder to read, to boot.
>> Retaining the apostrophe for possessive use only is restrictive,
>> though often confused. How else can we pluralise 'US' - other than
>> to change to an attributive use?
>
> Could you paraphrase that? I didn't understand it. Was it about
> the United States which is already a plural (surely there could
> only be *one* of *them*)?
Uh, yes - not expressed well... Why shouldn't the apostrophe be used
for more than possessive examples (such as contractions,
pluralisations, etc)?
An example of the use of US: 'How many US's would it take to consume
the world's food supply?' Perhaps I should have chosen another
acronym with a final 'S', but the point is there.
>> How would we write, "Delete all .exe's from the directory"?
>
> I often have this problem where I have a domain name at the end of
> a sentence like www.google.com. Should I put a full stop straight
> at the end (like I just did)? Sometimes I ad a space at the end
> i.e. www.yahoo.com . It's not right but it works better for me;-)
I've spent years (literally) editing people's full-stop omissions
back into sentences. I don't understand why a sentence ending with a
URL can't have a full-stop to signify the end of the sentence. Why do
so many people shy away from it? And e-mail addresses, too!
(yes, I know that http://mysite.com.au/index.html. is likely to fail
when http://mysite.com.au/index.html was intended, but surely there
isn't a single internet-capable person on the planet who can't work
that out?)
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