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Companies that handle online sales either buy or have someone whose duties include figuring out how sales tax matches address. Here in California many areas ha
by JJMcJ 4y ago
Companies that handle online sales either buy or have someone whose duties include figuring out how sales tax matches address. Here in California many areas have sales tax surcharges and the ZIP may not conform to the boundaries.
For mail delivery, the name of the post office is appropriate. For other things it may not be. Constant problem for school districts, for example.
Also one author noted that the USPS uses "ZIP" code but the O'Reilly style book has "Zip" code.
- gumby 4y ago“ZIP” is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan so unsurprisingly the USPS is correct in this usage.
- JJMcJ 4y agoSame way someone always knows how to correctly pronounce their name, even if you think it's wrong or it's not how the country of origin pronounces the name. Off topic for this posting but FORTRAN became Fortran around 1990, but it's still COBOL.
- gumby 4y agoAnd there's the horrible neologism "internet" as a noun -- ugh! Even blessed by some style guides.
- JJMcJ 4y agoYou mean instead of the Internet? It's a matter of some controversy but the public Internet that I'm using to reply probably should be capitalized. Discussion of the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology including usage before computer networking. In particular the article mentions This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move to lowercase as they become familiar.
- dragonwriter 4y agoI mean, if you prefer all-caps for acronyms (some style guides prefer all-caps for initialisms that are not acronyms, and initial-cap for acronyms.)
- gumby 4y agoDo you have examples of the latter in English? The all-caps convention is not the common one in most languages with a Latin alphabet, but we're talking about English here.
- dragonwriter 4y agoSignificantly more common in British English than American English. See, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a (under “abbreviations and acronyms”.)