From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-05-29T03:30:43+09:00
Subject: Re: death toll

On 28 May 2009, at 19:23, Roger Pack wrote:
> Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>> deka <rocha.deka@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hi, I am a Brazilian girl and I have a doubt abour numbers in  
>>> English.
>>> I have a book in English where there is a table on cumulative  
>>> civilian
>>> death toll in wars. They put "100s africans, 1000s civil war..."  
>>> and I
>>> would like to know the meaning of the little "s" after the numbers.
>>
>> Notice that this is very bad typological style to print digits in
>> these cases.  They should have spelled them out: "hundreds of
>> africans, thousands of civil wars".
>
> or at least written them as
> 100's and 1000's

Except that would in principle be 'of the hundred' and 'of the  
thousand' as using the numeric form isn't an abbreviation and so an  
apostrophe before the s isn't appropriate for pluralisation. It is  
however an increasingly widespread usage (thanks to the inability of  
many people to use the apostrophe correctly).


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason