Apostrophe's (was: Re: Mandrake 10 was [plug] MDK users was: MP3 ripper or some other software to copy cd's to my HDD)

James Devenish devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au
Sat Jun 26 13:07:54 WST 2004


In message <Pine.LNX.4.44.0406252311280.5522-100000 at BBRH73.busby.net>
on Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:15:51PM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> > James Devenish wrote:
> > I can vaguely see why people would do it -- one use of apostrophes is
> > for contraction, and CDs is an abbreviation.
> Are you sure?
> Is the term "CD", an abbreviation, or an acronym?

I would be happy to call it an acronym, but some people would prefer to
classify it as an initialism (since it's spoken as "See Dee" rather than
pronounced as "kud"). If an apostrophe were appropriate, though, we'd
presumably be writing C'D, DV'D, lase'r, rada'r, et'c. One circumstance
where I /do/ see a lot of "'s" appearing with plurals is in mathematics.
Because there is a practice of using lowercase letters for acronyms such
as pdf (probability distribution function), I have seen textbooks with
"pdf's". In the wider world, though, this should be written as "PDFs",
"pdfs", or "P.D.F.s". One situation in which "'s' is apparently
appropriate is when the plural is to be taken as typographically
literal, such as when describing the text "11111111111111" as "a series
of 1's", or "1980-1989" as "the 1980's".





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