'eg' means 'for example', you meant 'ie'

[GarlicMaybeNot]

On the one hand, it's nice that people are using literary abbreviations. On the other, I wish they'd use the right one!

While we're at it, 'persay' isn't a thing. It's 'per se'.

I love a good i.e

and also love a well placed inter alia

Ooh, me too! Haven't used that one for ages - although, for some reason, I always feel I have to italicise it.

Totally with @penjil and @Missedmytoe on Chester draw's and on root. I try to 'reign in' my annoyance, though 😬

I bet many people have no idea they are abbreviations of Latin phrases or what the initials stand for. Same with 'etc' which so many people on here write as 'ect'. They must presumably never use the phrase in actual conversation or they would realise they were using the wrong abbreviation. Actually they probably wouldn't as again they most likely have no idea at all that it's a Latin phrase.

I used to be an audio typist. Clerk used "ableet" in a sentence. Kept re-listening to it, gave up and asked him. He meant albeit, obvs just reading from a template with no idea what it meant 😄

Oh no. I've always used i.e. to mean e.g. I had no idea. I wonder how many people reading my emails at work know this.

I’ve got 2 colleagues who both insist on saying “working progress” instead of “work in progress”. We have folders named that all over Sharepoint. Drives me absolutely crackers as I go around re-naming them.

ie and eg I can’t get excited about but I do wonder why some people just know the right one and others just seem oblivious.

When I was little I thought it was ect, and that the t was the t in cetera rather than the t in et.

I've never noticed e.g. and i.e. being misused.

I was taught Latin when I was at school in the late Sixties and early Seventies. I'm sure that's how I know the difference between eg and ie and what etc is short for. So perhaps it's a question of education?

I do wonder why some people just know the right one and others just seem oblivious.
Ever heard of a thing called a dictionary? It has words in it like "curiosity" and "autodidact".

Is ‘supercilious’ in there too?

Should that be prefixed with i.e. or e.g.?

In fairness I’m lazy and miss out the punctuation.

Bearing in mind language is about communication, if you read persay, and think ohhh that's per se, haven't they achieved their objective?

This isn't AIBU; it's pedants' corner. If you're not interested in this sort of conversation, why open the thread?

The same question applies to @ilovepixie and @SusanKennedyshouldLTB

It's seems pointless to wander into pedants' corner, open a pedantic thread and criticise the pedantry.

I've no problem using eg and ie correctly (I was never taught Latin but just seem to have picked them up) but inter alia isn't a phrase that I use naturally.

Can you give an example of how it would be used?

It certainly is. I don't think the phrase "get a life" is, though.

I do wonder why some people just know the right one and others just seem oblivious
You will note that keye engaged with the subject, asked questions, learned and thanked people nicely. Other people wrote angry messages and left in a huff, probably none the wiser. You are allowed to be supercilious about examples like that.

My son has severe dyslexia.

He sees every letter twice and they move, but not in unison. A traditional size dictionary looks like a jiggly qwerty code to him.

I think it's a bloody miracle he can spell phonetically and even communicate in writing, don't you?

Bearing in mind language is about communication, if you read persay, and think ohhh that's per se, haven't they achieved their objective?

Language is about communication, but it's not only about communication. It's also about style and self-expression. The language we use is a choiceand says quite a lot about us, whether we like it or not.

at the grumpy 'get a life' posters. Do you go onto all the other conversation boards and criticise OPs for starting threads about the exact things for which the whole board was actually created?

I think you are behind the curve.

Being pedantic about language ignoring the wider context does, indeed, say something about you.

I normally edit i.e. out of reports, on the basis that if you need to use it the first half of the sentence wasn't clear enough. E.g. is occasionally allowed to stay

@Ohmylovejune my son has the same visual stress dyslexia, he's had glasses made that help enormously (when he actually wears them!). They work much better than overlays, as tailor made for him.

Where I live we use qua a lot. There's not really an English equivalent, but I'm not sure if it would be understood in a general conversation in the UK. Must try to get inter alia into internal memos more often!

"Inter alia" means "among other things" so you could say:
Mumsnet is a web forum that allows posts on diverse topics such as, inter alia, pedantry.
It implies "this example or list is not exhaustive".

I teach an essay-based A-level, and as part of the course we read academic book chapters and papers. I teach my students all of the common Latin abbreviations, but I wouldn't generally expect them to have met them when they start the course. Some rarer ones pop up too, e.g. "op. cit." and "viz."

I do enjoy the sound of the stock phrases, inter alia "mutatis mutandis" (i.e. "changing where appropriate"), but there's very little reason to keep most of them in Latin these days.