Maybe your customer is treating M&M as an acronym and thinks it's pronounced "MMMMMMMNNNNMMMMMMM."

Consider, "this is a NASA project". "NASA" is usually pronounced "nasuh".

Now consider "this is an NEA project". "NEA" (National Endowment for the Arts) is pronounced "en-ee-ay", the letters spelled out.

If someone wanted to, they could say "this is an NASA project" and say it as "this is an en-ay-ess-ay project".

If you saw it written rather than hear it spoken, it would be have to be inferred that the writer intended on NASA being spelled out one letter at a time; unusual, but not necessarily incorrect.

Similarly, someone could say "this is a NEA project", pronounced "this is a nee-uh project".

Of course, M&M is not actually an acronym. It is pronounced: "em and em" or maybe "em an' em", so, of course, you are correct, not your customer.

By the way, George Carlin once said "if you have 24 odds and ends on a table, and 23 fall off, what do you have left, an odd or an end?"

My retort is "if you have 24 M&M's on a table and 23 fall off, what do you have left? an M or an M?"

How about "your call will be answered after we answer all the other calls that were received before your call...was received"?

You know, this is a real problem. The language is evolving, but not quickly enough. After hundreds of years in modern english, the use of "he", etc. as a general genderless pronoun has been abolished as politically incorrect, but still, to this day, there is no comfortable generally agreed upon alternate. "He or she" is usually a mouthful, especially in informal speech, or when repeated frequently. "They" still is a mismatched case. We don't use "it" to describe people. "... do one's duty" works, but "one" really doesn't work as an object by itself. Remember when Ms. was invented to overcome the Miss/Mrs. inequity? I think a new word needs to be invented to solve this problem.
PS - I have recently read a lot of parenting books (I am a new father) and have noticed a fair number of them refer to the child consistently as "she". What do you all think of that?

There were a few other posts on this topic as well.

I seem to remember learning in gradeschool that if your quote ended a sentence then the period, exclamation point, etc. would be placed inside the final quote only if it was appropriate pucntuation for the quoted material itself without the rest of the sentence.

e.g., Which one of you said "I'll do it"?

The question mark should not be inside, since "I'll do it" is not a question. Is this correct?

I never even heard of putting commas inside the quotes and I'm American. You learn something every day. I must have been asleep that day in class.

Avrom, Iisabella, the dictionary backs you up. They are pronounced the same.

Hi Speedwell, re: "Why does it do that?..." Whenever you paste any link into this forum, only a portion of the link is displayed. The rest is automatically replaced with an ellipsis, probably to improve readability with overly long links. The actual link is live and will function properly when clicked on. Depending on your browser and settings, the full link will be displayed in the bottom border of the browser window when the mouse hovers over it.

Oh, and Dyske, I probably wouldn't count "nite" or "lite", because, sadly, most people who use them don't do so intentionally.

How about something like "zpelling" or "reezolving" or "signiphying" or something? You know, take the verb "to spell" or one of its synonyms and apply the very action to the word itself: if you zpell the word "spell" you get "zpell".

Sorry anonymous, you didn't think it through all the way. "One" may be the noun, but "do whatever it takes" is modifying "professors", not "one". Think of it like this:
One what?
One of those professors.
Which professors?
Those who do whatever it takes...
The correct choice is 2 (not the example BEFORE choice 1, because it has a mismatch of case. It should be "get their point across..." not "get his point across...").
This was explained quite clearly in the posts below.

I once got involved in an extensive argument about this very subject on another forum. It turns out that there are so many different and quite technical definitions of types of rhymes that it's almost meaningless to say what does and doesn't rhyme. I previously took the position that words whose final unstressed syllable sounded the same do not actuallly rhyme, but there is a particular type of rhyme (whose name escapes me for now) quite technically defined that describes this. It might be trivial, poetically, but every single word that ends in -er rhymes. Every word that ends in -le can be considered to rhyme. All the comments below describe a particular SUBSET of definitions of rhyming, but not all definitions. I ultimately capitulated in my other argument, but only on a technicality. This also means that all of the words listed below that have no rhymes, actually do, at least with some definitions of rhyme.