Don't get eg on your face

[robinturner]

From the Guardian Style Guide: "Do not use full points in abbreviations, or spaces between initials: BBC, US, mph, eg, 4am, lbw, No 10, PJ O'Rourke, WH Smith, etc". Note that I have placed the full stop after the quotation marks to indicate that this sentence has no full stop. This aside, I am in favour of dropping full stops, points, periods, dots or whatever you like to call them in capitalised acronyms; I too write "US", not "U.S.", because there is no danger that it will be misinterpreted as "us" (except by computer illiterates who use the caps lock key for emphasis). I have not yet done this for people's initials, but I can see the logic. However, I regard "am" as the first person singular form of "be", "no" as a negative rather than a number, and "eg" as a typo for "egg".

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

I like the semi-colon; it is a much underused punctuation mark.

[earthemp6.livejournal.com]

Some might argue that it is now obsolete in common English.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I would argue that it's due for a come-back because of its extensive use in programming. There is also the possibility that, having used it for emoticons, peoplemy become curious as to what it does on its own.