[Outages-discussion] [outages] 1-28-2014 - AT&T outage in Maryland area

[Bill McGonigle]

On 01/28/2014 02:25 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

> We won't even discuss the fact "OC192's" is possessive, while "OC192s"
> is plural.

It depends on which style guide is your bible (and there are holy wars
about those) [1].  The old rule was that all initialisms, acronyms,
abbreviations (especially mixed class), numbers and single letters got an
apostrophe to disambiguate the pluralizing 's'.  So, Luke is using
historically correct style.

More commonly, these days, if an abbreviation has become a word, the
apostrophe is omitted if the apostrophe does not help to disambiguate (most
confusing in mixed case - QoSs or QoS's).  This is somewhat
audience-dependent - OC192 could be a noun to many of us.

Our lingo is so full of these that I use the apostrophe when I think it
will help avoid confusion.  Context can help.

-Bill


[1]
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55970/plurals-of-acronyms-letters-numbers-use-an-apostrophe-or-not
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