On 28 May 2009, at 15:25, 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".

In prose yes, but for table headers space considerations are relevant  
and I've seen the same approach used in numerous publications.

> (It could be tolerated for decades, like the 60s or the 70s (the
> sixties, the seventies), but this is not "Y2K-compliant", and writting
> 1960s is not good style either, so even in this case it's better to
> spell the numbers out).

I'd say that 1960s would be a much more common occurrence than  
nineteen sixties, although 60s and sixties probably are more evenly  
distributed in my reading.


Ellie

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