The writer on the Yahoo! front page is not too swift when it comes to abbreviations. For some reason, the abbreviation for miles per hour gets capital letters:
According to the American Heritage Dictionary (which is available on Yahoo!), MPH stands for Master of Public Health.
July 4, 2012 at 2:40 pm
What rule says that? It’s a style convention. It’s perfectly permissible to capitalize MPH if that is the style convention you have chosen and you stay consistent. AP Stylebook is not the authority for all, but a set of guidelines that AP has chosen to follow.
July 4, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Kate, that might well be a style convention and anyone who’s followed Terribly Write for a week or more knows that Yahoo has no “house” style. On the same day that MPH appeared on yahoo.com, mph also appeared on the same page. I consulted the American Heritage Dictionary (which is a part of the yahoo.com network and therefore ought to be available to all Yahoo! staff), the AP Stylebook (which seems reasonable since Yahoo! gets so much of its material from AP, you’d think it would want to be consistent with AP) as well as the Random House Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Wikipedia, Only Wikipedia listed the alternative of MPH.
July 4, 2012 at 5:48 pm
OK, as long as we agree it’s a question of inconsistent style, not strictly a rule being broken. You didn’t say Yahoo had contradicted itself elsewhere on the same page.
As the Kansas City Star’s copy editors say: “The important thing to remember is that many aspects of written language are determined by style, not grammar — and just because something diverges from a particular style does not mean it’s wrong.”
http://blogs.kansas.com/grammar/2012/06/04/style-and-grammar-or-why-lots-of-things-arent-wrong/#more-1256#storylink=cpy