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Subject:Re: Correct Wording for Examples From:"Wayne J. Douglass" <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 22 Nov 1996 14:35:19 -0800
At 04:10 PM 11/22/96 -0600, Stephen P. Victor wrote:
>Gillian McGarvey wrote:
>>
>> Is it correct that we generally shouldn't use abbreviations like "e.g."
>> and "i.e." in order to avoid giving the user any extraneaous terms that
>> cause the reader to process more info than they must already?
>Some consider these abbreviations difficult for non-native speakers of
>English to understand. They might also be a problem for translators, who
>often are themselves not native speakers of English. Instead (so the
>story goes), we should use their full English equivalents ("for example"
>and "that is").
Hell, they're hard for *English* speakers to understand because they're
abbreviations from Latin. How many English speakers would know "exempli
gratia," "id est," or "videlicet" (abbreviated as viz.) if you put them in
the text?
O tempora, o mores!
--Wayne Douglass
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