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Comment by milesrout | Hacker News Reader

Wrong. Look at any dictionary. Etc is completely fine. What next, are you going to pretend you write N.A.S.A. or Mr. White? Come on

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc. - even the URL has the period, and I did in fact look this up before replying :)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc even redirects to the correct URL with a "."

Merriam-Webster is an American dictionary and therefore totally irrelevant to me.

You said "look at any dictionary", so I did. I notice you can't provide a link to a single dictionary that supports you, or even name what dialect supposedly doesn't have "etc."

Etc. is an abbreviation for etcetera. Correctly signifying contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms is far more commonplace than using the correct dash. Almost everyone would have learned about shortening words in high school; many people leave university without ever having heard of an em dash.

Etc is also an abbreviation of et cetera. Only Americans put pointless dots everywhere.

This is all stuff you learn in school. Punctuation isn't obscure or niche. You may not have learnt about semicolons or em dashes in school but you should have and I did. As did anyone that has ever read a novel. There are two semicolons on the first page of the first Harry Potter book, a novel read by approximately every child of my generation. There are loads of examples of the proper use of dashes and other "obscure" punctuation marks in any professionally typeset text.

> Only Americans

I was raised and educated in Africa, specifically the GCSE curriculum. I was taught to use etc.

>Mr. White

As opposed to what, exactly?

Mr White, which is correct English. I believe Americans might put a dot after these abbreviations, but nobody else does.

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