A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title... | Hacker News

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giardini on Nov 25, 2009 | parent | context | favorite | on: An Engineer's Guide to DNS

A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples:

" It's hard to observe the DNS..."

"Using the DNS is often compared to..."

When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it?

I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.

aristus on Nov 25, 2009 [–]

Yeah, it bothered me too. :) I was trying to get across that I was talking about a singular world-spanning entity instead of some abstract protocol. I'm not sure of the real grammar rules.

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