On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:23, David Earl <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/11/2009 16:17, Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) wrote: >> and other punctuation (eg St. to St as an abbreviation for >> Saint). > > St. is wrong anyway - strictly speaking there should only be a period > after an abbreviation where letters are omitted, hence
Depends on which variant of English you're using. In the USA, the formal rule is to put a period after any abbreviation comprised of the first and last letter of a word, but US Postal Service fiat is that abbreviations can have no punctuation other than hyphens and that has generally been copied into most maps. Thus, Saint Elmo Road is "St. Elmo Rd." in a newspaper, but "St Elmo Rd" on an envelope or in TIGER data. I tend to cringe at the signs on a street named William Cannon locally. There are a lot of places where "WM. CANNON" got replaced with "W. M. Cannon" when they last renewed the signs and switched from all-caps to mixed case. -- David J. Lynch [email protected] _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
