that typo will not be found too egregious i hope.
> i'm afraid i have to disagree, here. -'s is never a correct formation of
> the plural, even with proper nouns or abbreviations (CDs, not CD's; 70s,
> not 70's). i know it's tempting, and it took me a while to get over, in
> part because goofball ex-usenet folks like me (and apparently ravi ;-)
yes definitely! are we a dying breed?
> never capitalize anything, so you wind up with "i bought some cds" or
> "the ciscos are down," which can be confusing. what i usually do is
> actually capitalize things like that to try to avoid confusion, even if
> it means i have to hit the shift key. :-)
no, but "Ciscos" doesnt help me either, though CDs does. i continue my defense of the indefensible: so, just as you, i give up my lowercase purism, reluctantly adopting the vulgar excess of capitalization (capitalism?) instead, and write CDs, 80s, URLs (pronounced you-are-ells, not like "hurls" without the h ;-). you may find an earl at the pelican club but i doubt there are any on the web). however that still does not make my "ciscos" more readable (and clearly CISCOs would be quite wrong).
now, here's another technical question (all of this still being unrelated to observing left business): where do you fall on the issue of the ")" of a smiley closing or not closing an opening "(" i.e., would you write:
i don't like you (and yo mama is fat ;-)
or i don't link you (and yo mama is fat ;-))
now, if you go for the former, then what happens when the smiley is in the middle of the sentence (such as in my point above, about the correct pronunciation of "URL")?
since i moved to the USA, i have noticed that periods and such punctuations are included within quotes: trembling with fear, the gentle nobel peace laureate kissinger cried, "these protesters are being mean to me." i shudder at this style, preferring instead: bush explained to the confused audience that "compassionate conservatism is about compassion for the silliness of conservatism".
is it simply bad memory that convinces me that the style i prefer is the older?
--ravi (with apologies to joanna for hijacking the thread)