Apostrophes.

August 13, 2003, 12:08 pm

Mike mentioned his frustration with apostrophe misunderstanding.

I replied to him:

One use of apostrophes that is common among programmers/computer nerds is

I grep'ed those files for explitives.

Where grep'ed is the past tense verb of running the program, grep. I guess the resoning is that if you said "grepped", people might be confused about the name of the program (?).

This is also common when referring to calling functions:

I fixed the problems by strip_slash()'ing the user input.

Not that I expect those uses to get added to the next edition of The Elements of Style.... unless they had a ”Special Nerd Edition”.

(That's another thing nerds do: putting the period on the outside of a quotation.)