this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

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[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 43 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

I won't dog on them since the context implies this is ESL, but seeing "etc." punctuated as though it's an acronym is unholy.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 1 points 7 hours ago

Extra Truncated Cases

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 20 points 15 hours ago

Why did you have to point it out? I didn't even notice until you did!

[–] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

If their first language is a Romance language it still isn't an excuse, because "etc" comes from the Latin.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

But punctuation rules might be very different, e.g. in Spanish ordinal numerals are supposed to have a dot to denote that it's a contraction: 1.º

Nowadays this seems to die down, but it still is in the rules:

Entre el número y la letra volada debe haber un punto.

There must be a period between the number and the superscript letter.

https://www.rae.es/buen-uso-espa%C3%B1ol/los-ordinales

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 23 minutes ago* (last edited 18 minutes ago)

Do any of those languages actually have a rule that you're supposed to put a dot in the middle of "et," though? It'd be pretty weird if they did because "et" is one word...

"e.t.c." makes about as much sense as "a.n.d. other things."

(At least the old-fashioned English way of doing it, with a ligature connecting the e and t like so: "&c" was somewhat reasonable.)