Assume v. Presume

Black Hole said:
It all started when they referred to the Severn Bridge's.
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Is it just me, or is that apostrophe a bit suspect?
There are two bridges. I look at the quoted sentence and think one bridge, called the Severn Bridge, and something (unstated) that belongs to it.:confused:
 
If that's up for discussion, why not ir and uv unless they are at the start of a sentence? I suppose it's so that you pronounce it eye arr and you vee as opposed to ....
 
Most references to it that I can see uses infrared (unless at the start of a sentence). Same for ultraviolet. So as it appears that they are both just one word then Ir and Uv
 
Trev said:
If that's up for discussion, why not ir and uv unless they are at the start of a sentence? I suppose it's so that you pronounce it eye arr and you vee as opposed to ....
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You have a point there. "Mr" (for example) is an abbreviation but pronounced in full, so IR or Ir should depend on whether the author intends it to be read as "IR" or "infrared".
 
I'd say it depends on whether you class the resulting letters as an abbreviation or an acronym. I expect that when IR and UV were first discovered the words were separate, so these are acronyms. Mr is an abbreviation of a title, so might expect to have a capital m, whereas etc is a simple abbreviation.
 
IR & UV: Also why PV in PVC; EM in EMC, EMP, and EMI (not the record company, but electromagnetic interaction)?
My guess is the scientist who first published results, used the abbreviation and it stuck.
How about GI bleed for gastrointestinal bleed?
Then there is another problem (very slightly) related to WebIf or WebIF. With web addresses in the UK academic domain, how do you pronounce it?
somewhere.ac.uk - is it somewhere dot ay see dot you kay, or somewhere dot ack dot you kay? I prefer "ack".
 
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