punctuated abbreviations // was english spelling reform

John Cowan wrote:

> Except to the (linguistically) conservative lot in North America, who
> put periods at the end of all abbreviations, period. (And if "period"
> was good enough for Cicero, it's good enough for us -- "full stop", indeed;
> sounds like a football position!) None of this business of writing
> "Mr" instead of "Mr.".
I know that in my parents' generation people were still taught to put
dots after abbreviations such as "Mr" - Mum still does it, for one -
but it's certainly no longer fashionable. The question of which
abbreviations still get dots after them is subject to some individual
variation, but as Tristan says, by and large "Mr" does not while "No."
does.

I can remember being marked wrong in a junior class at school
(probably third grade or something) for using "No." in a poem. We had
not been taught, at the time, that such abbreviations are out of place
in poetry, so that's an example of the common educational tactic of
waiting until children make a mistake before telling them that it is a
mistake!

Adrian.

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