[YuriTokoro]

Originally Posted by ColinHowell

To expand Koir's explanation, "e.g." is of Latin origin, but it has become a standard part of educated English usage. As Koir said, it means "for example", and it is followed by one or more examples of the thing being discussed. By the way, it is properly written as "e.g.", with periods after the letters, though it seems some people omit the periods these days.

It stands for Latin "exempli gratia", but almost no one who uses it knows that. (I certainly didn't--I looked it up.)

Hi, ColinHowell.
Thank you for helping.
If everyone writes it “e.g.”, I would have noticed that must stand for something, or a dictionary I use had the word, but I didn’t know you write that without periods. The dictionary didn’t have “eg”.

Unfortunately, it's fairly common for English speakers to get "e.g." confused with "i.e.", which has a different meaning. "i.e." means "that is" and stands for Latin "id est". (Again, few users remember the original Latin.) "i.e." is usually used before a further clarification or elaboration of what is being discussed, rather than a listing of specific examples.

This is helpful information.
And I will remember that you sometimes write these words without periods.

Originally Posted by ColinHowell

You should probably remove the "[ɡaidʑiɴ]" bit. That's just the pronunciation as written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It's pretty normal for English Wikipedia pages to include IPA pronunciations for foreign words or names, but outside of Wikipedia it will probably look like confusing gibberish to most readers.

OK. I’ll do that. Thank you for your advice.

Well, that question seems to be a political minefield, which is one reason the article is practically drowning in citations. If you look at the article's Discussion page, you'll find the writers apparently had a hell of a time agreeing on what to say--the discussion has nine archive sections! This is the sort of article that can become a real battlefield.

I didn’t know it is such touchy.

Personally, I think the word may have had some bad connotations among foreigners in the past, but that may be changing; these days a lot of visitors to Japan or foreign residents in Japan seem happy to use it for themselves.

Do you mean that people who have never come to Japan still hate to be said “gaijin”, even if I don’t say it to address the people?