[ On Wednesday, August 2, 2000 at 19:13:21 (-0700), Bill Studenmund wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: plurals vs. apostrophes
>
> There is another reason, which is why I like to use 's in this case. It's
> not that MTUs looks weird, it's that with the way computer acronyms are
> made, MTUs is a perfectly consistent acronym. And a different one from
> MTU. Thus the use of 's to remove the ambiguity.

I don't agree that "MTUs" is perfectly cosistent with computer acronyms
-- in fact it would seem to be the exception, and a bad example in this
case too.  Not only that but the ones that do follow this form are quite
obvious and are usually not ones that you'd want to pluralise.

In fact in most of the on-line jargon and acronym sources I searched the
only use of a lowercase 's' after an acronym was to indicate a plural
usage.

In the "Jargon" file you will find (a very few) acronyms that end in
lowercase letters other than 's'.  However in all cases they are
exceptional exceptions where the lowercase letter is taken from the same
word as the preceding uppercase letter, such as "DLSw", "GaAs", "Hz",
"Si".  The only exception to this rule I've found so far is where the
lowercase letter is not the first letter of the word it stands for, such
as in "CD-RDx" (the only one I found online so far).  There are
"non-standard" acronyms in communications that sometimes do this too,
such as "Tx", but the more commonly used versions of most of these are
all uppercase (TXD).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>