From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-05-29T06:08:52+09:00
Subject: Re: death toll

On 28 May 2009, at 19:55, Robert Klemme wrote:
> On 28.05.2009 20:30, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>> On 28 May 2009, at 19:23, Roger Pack wrote:
>>> Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>
>>>> 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).
>
> The same happens over here in Germany, just the other way round:  
> although German does not allow for an apostrophe when building a  
> genitive you can see "Dietmar's Hotel" and like phrases with  
> increasing frequency where "Dietmars Hotel" would have been  
> correct.  In the end we will probably all speak some form of  
> "English". :-)

There is a school of thought which believes all punctuation is evil...


Ellie

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