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  • From: jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Activist web update
  • Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:33:48 +1000

On Monday 14 August 2006 10:04 pm, Kai Vido wrote:
] The book catalogue looks good. I will, however, mention a pet peeve of
] mine: When writing the plural form of CD or DVD, as with all nouns,
] there should be no apostrophe. I am not sure where the notion came from
] that the plural form of a noun should be possessive, but it has swept
] the English language, particularly on the web. Sorry for the griping
] nature of my recent email's :-)

email's? <raises eyebrow>

It's always a dangerous pursuit -- that of discussing spelling,
syntax, semantics, semiotics and so on. I won't touch on the
correct usage of colons and misplaced capitalisations following
from colons. Well, touch, but not dwell.

It's like asking people to not top-post, and to trim unnecessary bits
from their postings, keeping in mind the 1:n ratio of author:readers.

We all have out pet peeves.

But to your question, I gather it's still a matter of taste, and the
historical trends differ substantially on the usage of acronyms
and abbreviations across the various ponds. Distinguishing between
plurals and possessives is important, verily, but the subject is
somewhat complicated in the IT world (in particular) due to the
trend of using many lower-case acronyms and abbreviations, with the
consequence of requiring a more obvious way of denoting the trailing
s as *not* being part of the abbreviation proper.

Of course, this doesn't excuse all those people that like to put an
apostrophe near the end of any word that terminates with an s, just
in case. (Photo's and its' are two of the more regular examples.)

Btw, can I plant my eggplants / aubergines the same way I'd plant
a tomato -- ie, by stripping most of the leaves off the thing and
planting it up to its 'neck', as it were? This is one of those
topics that's inherently tricky to find information on.

Jedd.




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