Monday, July 25, 2016

Alas, Poor 'E.G.'! I Knew it, 'I.E.'

In the interest of accessibility, UK government websites are now going to remove Latin abbreviations such as 'e.g.', 'i.e.', and 'etc.' from its websites. Good!

Alas, poor 'e.g.'! I knew it, 'i.e.': a construction of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: it hath
borne me on its back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!

Oh, wait: et tu, 'i.e.'?

(And now that I am looking this up, is a double colon like the above really legal? That seems extremely odd to me; and it also makes me want to construct a sentence with infinitely nested colons.)

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