If not, is there another Stack Exchange site where it would be a better fit?

CSS, as we know, stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a plural phrase. One would say "Cascading Style Sheets are used to provide a central location for all of the stylings of a project" (note the 'are'). However, it seems to be the prevalent usage to say "CSS is used to provide a central location for all of the stylings of a project" (singular). Why do we do this, and is this correct?

(I realize I used this form in the first sentence, but that was referring to the acronym itself, not Cascading Style Sheets)

Update: This question has been posted at EL&U.

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How about English Language & Usage? –  hammar Aug 30 '11 at 15:00
I thought english.SE might be best, but since it seemed pretty specific to programming, I thought maybe here or programmers.SE might be acceptable, and probably provide a more relevant answer, as the people using SO and P.SE are the people using the terms in my question. –  Jim Aug 30 '11 at 15:08
As long as you provide some basic explanation of what CSS means, as you did in your example, this should be perfectly answerable by the people at english.SE. –  hammar Aug 30 '11 at 15:14
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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

It seems a question for English Language and Usage.

The FAQ reports the following text:

The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts. Questions on the following topics are welcomed here:

  • Usage, word choice, and grammar
  • Etymology (history of words’ development)
  • Dialect differences
  • Pronunciation (phonetics and phonology, dialectology)
  • Spelling and punctuation
  • Problems encountered by people learning English

But please, don’t ask any questions about these topics. They are out of scope for this site.

  • Please proofread my document ("are there any mistakes in this text?")
  • Languages other than English (including translation)
  • How to improve my English
  • How to name this function/variable in my program
  • Criticism, discussion, and analysis of English literature
  • Peeving about grammar disguised as a question
  • "Explain this joke to me", except in the case where the crux of the joke relies on an aspect of English covered by one of the welcomed topics above.
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Sidenote: There have been questions about programming specific language questions on Meta.English: Could we add tags for domain-specific language questions, such as programming? Is Python a snake or a programming language? If the latter, why is it choking my dog? Those are providing some guidelines for such questions. –  Time Traveling Bobby Aug 30 '11 at 15:12
The second question you linked is the reason why the FAQ reports "How to name this function/variable in my program" as question you should not ask on EL&U. –  kiamlaluno Aug 30 '11 at 15:24
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No, this is off-topic on Stack Overflow; it's a question about grammar and language. Let's make the FAQ-Test:

  • a specific programming problem: No
  • a software algorithm: No
  • software tools commonly used by programmers: Nope
  • matters that are unique to the programming profession: Naaahhhh...

That's 0 out of 4.

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