A Grammar Lesson From Danny Sullivan

Posted by Greg on January 27th, 2006

Danny has been on a tear as of late. In the latest post from his new blog, he points out some grammar issues in the DOJ Google subpoena. :)

Work

Comments

7 Responses to “ A Grammar Lesson From Danny Sullivan ”

  1. Chris on January 27th, 2006 4:05 pm

    Speaking of grammar, in his post, shouldn’t “continuously” be “continually”?

  2. Erik on January 27th, 2006 4:06 pm

    The plural acronym thing wouldn’t bother me so much of the DOJ hadn’t paid $419 for each apostrophe.

  3. anonymous observer on January 27th, 2006 5:51 pm

    I hate to disagree with Danny Sullivan but since URL is an acronym (uniform resource locator), appending an apostrophe is grammatically correct.

    An example would be DJ’s - the plural of the acronym for disk jockeys. Correctly written, it should use an apostrophe when referring to pair of DJ’s or greater.

  4. randfish on January 27th, 2006 7:34 pm

    No - that’s wrong. The only time you would use “DJ’s” with an apostrophe would be when writing in the posessive, i.e:

    “The DJ’s style was not up to par with other DJs at the club.”

    This would hold true for URLs as well, i.e.

    “The URLs described in the document” vs. “The URL’s description”

    Read your Strunk & White!

  5. DigitalGhost on January 27th, 2006 8:03 pm

    He wants ‘continually’. Unless he means to say that the entire document consists of nothing but “URL’s”. For some reason I thought of beam and mote…

    Anyone want to bet that the lawyer used Word’s spell checking feature and let the document fly when no errors were found for URL’s?

  6. Erik on January 27th, 2006 8:19 pm

    Rand is right, and Chicago Manual of Style agrees. Apostrophes are allowed with plurals only when the abbreviation has multiple periods (M.A.’s or Ph.D.’s, for example).

  7. gsyi on January 30th, 2006 3:45 pm

    A css blog? :D You guys are crazy :-)

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