To a Frenchman, everything is a platitude that is not a paradox. The Bramleighs Of Bishop's Folly Charles James Lever A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth. The Ghost in the White House Gerald Stanley Lee It is tolerated to-day for no other reason than that it has cornered the platitude market.
Et al. is defined as an abbreviation for the Latin phrase et alia which means and others.. An example of et. al. used as an abbreviation is in the sentence, The article was written by Smith, Jones, Paul, et al. which means that Smith, Jones, Paul and others wrote the article. Origin of et al.
For example, in a bibliography, rather than listing five authors of a scientific paper, we can list the first author's name and then use et al. for the remaining four authors. Et al. always refers to people--not things. Doug was suggesting the use of et al. to avoid greeting a list of people.