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Comment by 8ytecoder | Hacker News Reader

Aids is not wrong. [1]

> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...

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It seems weird that this overrides the actual messaging from the groups themselves. NASA calls themselves NASA, not Nasa. English orthography is so removed from pronunciation that it seems quite arbitrary and useless to rework it for one specific case.

Also, it is irrelevant because this is the MIT reader press, not the BBC,and it is literally "AIDS" in the article title. BBC has their own standards. They don't set the standards for every article written in English.

The real reason is likely HN's broken auto-capitalization system.

I feel like it makes no sense to do this for AIDS seeing as it's already a word, with a different meaning

Newspaper writing styles can be strange. The New Yorker, for example, is probably the sole user of diaereses for commonly-known words.

To save others like me the trip to wikipedia, here's a snippet of wikipedia that explains what saagarjha is alluding to:

[Diaereses are] now far less commonly used in words such as coöperate and reënter except in a very few publications—notably The New Yorker [..]

Huh.

So when you wrote that comment, was TFA's URL a BBC link?

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