On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 06:08:41PM +0100, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
: Peter Constable wrote:
: > Well, you've caught Ken in a practice that many (most?)
: > English writers consider bad: using apostrophe in
: > forming plural.
:
: As a SLE speaker, I can't afford and I didn't mean to question anybody's
: writing skills.
:
: But, as you say, the apostrophe is legitimate and sometimes mandatory in the
: orthography of English and many other languages. So, it seems to me that its
: preferred encoding should make it possible to use it in identifiers,
: filenames, URI(')s, and so on.
Many people use apostrophes for plurals when the preceding text is not
a normal word: 90's, $'s.
I do computing, and have a technical need to use what are called
reserved words (really a special kind of punctuation in their own
little artificial languages, but spelled out as words or partial
words). Some of these reserved words are used in sentences where they
need to have affixes attached to make them sound grammatical. I tend
to use the apostrophe as a separator (in US-ASCII), as in the example
(invented here, with monotype font between _):
"When the (parent) process has _vfork_'ed a child process, the parent
is typically suspended until the shared address space is released by
the child when it _exit_'s or (more usually) _exec_'s a new program."
Some of these uses can be avoided by circumlocution, but the language
gets very stilted if that is always required. Font differences can
sometimes be adequate to avoid the separator, but not always. You may
find some people using a hyphen instead of the apostrophe, but some
sort of separator is almost required for legibility. In this context,
plural "s" is only one of the affixes of interest.
-- Christopher Vance
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