Pain in the English
Pain in the English

Unpacking English, Bit by Bit

A community for questioning, nitpicking, and debating the quirks and rules of the English language.

Pain in the English
Pain in the English

Unpacking English, Bit by Bit

A community for questioning, nitpicking, and debating the quirks and rules of the English language.

Username

Glen Wood

Member Since

October 1, 2012

Total number of comments

1

Total number of votes received

2

Bio

Latest Comments

eg, e.g., or eg.

  • October 1, 2012, 9:00am

"eg" is fine without full stops, as are other common abbreviations, especially capitalised ones, at least here in the UK.

However, maybe now we could reintroduce the "e.g." form. I think open punctuation was introduced because when using monospaced fonts (eg on typewriters and golfball printers) all those extra punctuation marks look horrible, add lots of visual clutter, and increase the chances of rivers forming in your text. Now, 30 years on, we all use proportionally-spaced fonts and the punctuation marks don't look /quite/ as bad...

Hmm I'm not sure which is most important to me - pedantically following the rules of the English language, or clean, uncluttered typography... I enjoy both :)