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Re: Bug#230751: dpkg: Missing . in man page of md5sum



On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 01:09:29 +0100, Josip Rodin <joy@srce.hr> posted to
gmane.linux.debian.devel.dpkg.general:
 > On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 10:20:18AM +0100, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
 >> Last line of man md5sum
 >> Lankester et al               29th November 1995 MD5SUM(1)
 >> It has to be "et al." (with a dot), because et is latin for and, and
 >> al. is the latin abbreviation for others.
 > WordNet explicitely accepts both with and without the period, and
 > Merriam-Webster doesn't even mention the period...

Dictionaries often do not cope well with punctuation in the headwords.

If <http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/guides/chicagogd.html> is not enough
of an example, look in Google for "chicago manual of style" and "et al" 

http://www.esc.edu/esconline/across_esc/writerscomplex.nsf/0/519eba0d0debbd09852569c30071d4fe?OpenDocument
states the following:

  Often, it is an open question whether or not to use periods with
  abbreviations. According to the Chicago Manual of Style the trend is
  strongly away from using periods with all kinds of abbreviations
  that have carried them in the past.

but then they proceed to give examples with periods nevertheless.

/* era */

-- 
formail -s procmail <http://www.iki.fi/era/spam/ >http://www.euro.cauce.org/
cat | more | cat<http://www.iki.fi/era/unix/award.html>http://www.debian.org/



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