Re: [vox] [OT] ISO's vs ISOs

[Micah Cowan <micMAPSah@cowan.name>]

Peter Jay Salzman writes:
 > begin Henry House <hajhouse@houseag.com> 
 > > On Sun, Jul 21, 2002 at 11:08:52PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
 > > > consider the following two sentences:
 > > > 
 > > >    A) Getting Debian ISO's has always been a painful experience.
 > > >    B) Getting Debian ISOs has always been a painful experience.
 > > > 
 > > > sentence B seems more correct, but to my eyes, sentence A looks more
 > > > pleasing; it just looks better with the apostrophe.
 > > 
 > > A is a deplorable modern degeneration. B is the correct choice according to
 > > one style guide, and my personal preference as well. The reader can tell that
 > > the ess is not part of the acronym by its small case.
 >  
 > not good enough.  there are acronyms that use both upper and lower case.
 > particularly, medical acronyms for chemical names use both upper and
 > lower case.
 > 
 > not all acronyms use all uppercase.  what would you do to make the
 > sentence unambiguous in that case?

Most of the time (in the case of software naming conventions), those
acronyms aren't true acronyms, but are a bastardization of the process
("borrowing" letters which are not initials). But there's not much to
do about that.

Your specific example, though, is a clear reason to use apostrophes,
at least in those situations. Unless there's another way to
typographically disambiguate them.
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