One of the dangers of being a Grammarnator is that your column becomes an invitation to everyone else to find fault with it. Take Robert Pingree’s July 2 column, for instance, where he confuses e.g. with i.e.. Mr. Pingree writes “before doing something else – i.e. putting in the casserole or the roast . . .” But “i.e.,” id est, or that is, limits the discussion to what follows, putting in the oven the casserole or the roast or the cake; it excludes, for instance, heating a glass of water or drying a paint-brush. “E.g.,” on the other hand, has no such limitation. It means exempli gratia, for example, and would include anything that you might want to preheat. That is what Mr. Pingree meant in his otherwise excellent article about prefixes.
