Author Archives: sesquiotic

antimetabole

Posted on January 20, 2021 | 3 comments

“Not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

That’s really a throwback to the days of oratory past, isn’t it? How about this:

“While once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe,’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.’”

It really gets your heart racing a bit, doesn’t it? What a turnaround that represents!

Not just a turnaround in the outlook or course of a country, but – easy enough to see – a turnaround in the sentence. It’s a syntactic mirror of a mental transformation, a discovery, what Arthur Koestler called bisociation, what Edward de Bono called lateral thinking. The first phrase comes along, and the second throws it right back. That’s why the rhetorical figure is called antimetabole, from Greek ἀντιμεταβολή, from ἀντί (anti, ‘in the opposite direction’) and μεταβολή (metabolé, ‘turning around’) – which is in turn from μετα- (which means all sorts of things but as a prefix indicates change or transformation) and βολή (noun, ‘throw’). (Your metabolism is called metabolism because it’s all the constant changes happening in your body.)

But it also turns around and looks back. It puts itself in history by putting history in itself. The two quotes above are from Joe Biden and Amanda Gorman, from Biden’s inauguration today, January 20, 2021. Sixty years ago to the day, January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It has not been forgotten.

Antimetabole is a long-loved effect for the mental jiujitsu it performs. There is the grand old saying “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” And on the other hand, there is Malcolm X’s “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

There are less solemn instances, too. A type of joke called the Russian reversal is often associated with Yakov Smirnoff but pre-dates him; an example from Laugh-In is “Here in America, is very good, everyone watch television. In old country, television watch you!” Garry Kasparov made more trenchant use of it: “Every country has its own mafia; In Russia, the mafia has its own country.” The movie Mystery Men had a character called The Sphinx who was overly fond of such turns of phrase: “To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn” is a basic example; “When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack” is a bit more… convoluted. Some other fine examples, including one from the (not a comedy) movie Sophie’s Choice, are perhaps a little less polite.

This kind of turn of phrase is sometimes called a chiasmus, but chiasmus is a broader term that mainly denotes a reversal of grammatical structure without repetition of words: “By day the frolic, and the dance by night” (Samuel Johnson). I think antimetabole is a more likeable term anyway, not only because it’s longer (six syllables! two dactyls – an-ti-me-ta-bo-le – like two fingers crossing) but because, once you know the etymology, you know that it means what it says and it says what it means.

And when it is used on a grand occasion marking an important change, it uses a new order of words to make words for a new order.

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Pronunciation tip: waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals, forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail

Posted on January 17, 2021 | 1 comment

Shanties are the thing just now, so I thought I’d take the occasion to use one for a pronunciation tip on some words that have undergone sea changes between spelling and pronunciation. Here it is:

And here are the words:

Oh, I was a sailor without a mess kit
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
I came aboard in a top hat and waistcoat
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

They stripped me down, I was half frozen
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
Got fifteen lashes from a surly boatswain 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

There’s many a sight in land and sea to cause good people consternation
But the cursedest thing that ever be is English spelling and pronunciation

I said where’s me grog, they gave me a funnel
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
Till I emptied me guts hanging off a gunwale 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

I’m a man of letters, jots and tittles,
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
But I nearly died from the lack of victuals 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

You think it’s funny; I tell you, jokes’ll
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
Fall damn flat lashed down to the forecastle 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

There’s many a thing that tries your hand in ocean and geography
But you will never understand phonemics and orthography

They all called me weak, they called me a laggard
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
I’ll never forgive the captain, that blackguard 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

Taking to sea in search of yarns’ll
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals
End with you hanging up by the topgallant sail 
forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

Oh, I have faced the worstest riddles that mind and tongue will ever say:
waistcoat, boatswain, gunwale, victuals, forecastle, blackguard, topgallant sail, hey!

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ellipsis

Posted on January 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Sometimes you get to some words you just want to… you know… go around. Throw the reader a curve, maybe. Overlook some shortcomings. Stay in orbit around a point, or circle rather than land, if you get my…

Leaving out words may seem a bit dotty to some, but it’s downright dashing to others. And historically, dashes showed up a bit before dots to indicate omissions; they’re still used for parts of words (“What the f— did D— T— do now?”), but by the early 1700s the dots were remorselessly supplanting them to encode elision. (If you want to know their whole history, with as little omitted as possible, Anne Toner wrote a book about it.)

But let’s get around for a moment to how this function (and its dotty indicator) is called ellipsis, or in plural ellipses, which is also the plural of ellipse. Are ellipsis and ellipse related? Sure, they’re really the same word originally. And does that mean that ellipsis got its name from going around? No; rather, the ellipse got its name from coming short. The Greek origin is ἔλλειψις, which is the noun form of ἐλλείπειν (elleipein), which means ‘come short’ or – by extension – ‘omit’. It’s not that an ellipse comes short of being a circle; rather, it comes short of the slope of the side of a cone. You have to picture this in three-dimensional geometry: get a cone, and slice through it at an angle not as steep as the side but not as flat as the base (in other words, slice on a bias through an ice cream cone), and you will see an ellipse. (If you slice through it at a steeper angle than the side, you get a hyperbola. Remember: ellipsis is the opposite of hyperbole, at least in geometry but also in many other ways.)

Ellipsis in words is not quite so geometric, however, and trying to tie the function of the three dots to conic sections might lead to circular reasoning. It just happens to use the same word to indicate omission (by the way, elide is unrelated; it comes from Latin meaning ‘strike out’).

There are still debates about how to handle ellipses. As far as Microsoft Word is concerned, if you type three periods they should automatically become a single Unicode character… But as far as the Chicago Manual of Style is concerned, when I edit your book, I’m supposed to go through and replace all those with spaced periods . . . (and if the end of a sentence is involved, add a fourth. . . .). Other guides take various positions.

And how may you romp in the elision fields? Many authors (including sooooo many people over a certain age on Facebook) like to use them just to seem conversational and not to close off discourse (“So good to see you… you look so happy, LOL… wish you could join us here…”). Some well-known novelists used them for similar effect, but more literarily; the French novelist Céline is especially noted for it, in his case almost the literary equivalent of puffing a cigarette while talking. Normally in fiction the three dots indicate that speech has trailed off (whereas the dash indicates that it has cut off abruptly: consider the difference between “Why don’t you…” and “Why don’t you—”). But in nonfiction, they more often indicate that something has been left out of a quotation.

And just how it has been left out, well… There are rules about that, or at least established standards. You don’t have to put an ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation, even if it picks up and leaves off mid-sentence. But anything taken out of the middle requires one, and if you leave off in the middle of one paragraph and pick up in the middle of the next, you will need two with a paragraph break in between. And it is uncouth to use it to cause two strings of words that are far apart to seem connected (“To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether . . . conscience does make cowards of us all”), or to otherwise change the tone or tenor (reducing, for instance, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up” to “To every thing there is a season . . . a time to heal . . . and a time to build up”). And it is really quite out of the question in polite, responsible company to use the movie poster ellipsis, which can change “an astounding avalanche of bad taste that left me speechless with dry heaves” into “astounding . . . left me speechless!”

Which means that the subterfuge in this poem from Songs of Love and Grammar is thoroughly outré. But it wouldn’t be worth a poem otherwise:

Ellipsis that shall never touch

“Dot, Dot, Dot,” I asked my belle,
“will you stay and love me well?”
“Darling,” she said, “I’ll . . . be true;
there’s nothing that I’d . . . rather do.”

“Dot, Dot, Dot, please let me know,”
I asked her, “if our love will grow.”
“My dear, your words are . . . so sublime;
we must together spend . . . sweet time.”

“But Dot, Dot, Dot,” I said with doubt,
“I sense that you’ve left something out.”
“My words are true, where’er they fall;
not less, not less, I’ve told you all.”

And when she’d spent my funds and left,
’twas then that I, morose, bereft,
saw Dot, Dot, Dot’s words reconciled
and knew how I had been beguiled.

Although the words of truth were there,
her ellipsis spoke unfair;
not, less, not, less, had been estranged
and by mean dot, dot, dot exchanged.

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callid

Posted on January 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Flights of fancy and wit are great, but the landing can be a bit rough at times, and occasionally you draw flak. It helps to have a thick skin.

We may at first think of being thick-skinned as something that does not go together with cleverness. After all, to be clever, you need to be lithe, and burning with hot wit, yes? And thick skin is heavy and stiff. When someone’s really cracking wise or showing ingenuity, we say they’re on fire, and how can you be on fire if you’re all callused?

Well. You tell me how you can survive being on fire if you’re not. And if you’ve been on fire a few times and come out of it intact, I’m willing to bet your skin is not too thin.

This is why this word, callid, which means ‘crafty’ or ‘cunning’ (when it’s used at all, which is seldom anymore), does not trace to Latin calidus, ‘warm, hot, on fire’. No, it is from callidus, which means ‘clever, ingenious, crafty’ and – most to the point – ‘wise from experience’. And it is formed in turn from the verb callere, meaning ‘harden’. That root also gives us the (rarely used) noun and adjective callent, meaning ‘[one] knowledgeable or skilled in a particular area’ – and also the noun callus and the adjective callous.

We don’t think of a “callous” person as crafty or cunning, of course; we think of them as uncaring. And yet you can be said to be “thick-skinned” and still be likeable and thoughtful – and even caring. You are experienced to the point of being largely impervious to hurts to yourself, but you are not necessarily uncaring towards others. Funny how words that literally mean the same thing can have such different isotopes of sense.

And while callous humour is unpleasant and not really funny, people who are thick-skinned are more likely to be able to laugh at themselves, and to take risks and not be afraid of a bit of friction. A good and experienced cook probably has tough skin on skilled hands. What is calidus can thicken the skin and make it callidus. Wisdom means experience, means some amount of learned durability.

Look at it another way: we don’t really expect someone to be usefully quick-witted and inventive if they’re thin-skinned, do we?

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katexic

Posted on January 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

Sometimes circumstances can make us look a little exotic, perhaps even to the point of unrecognizability. Just yesterday I happened to encounter someone I’d known for about 23 years – since she was very young – and she didn’t recognize me at all at first. I chalk it up to my plague-length hair, though the mask I was wearing might not have helped. Well, at least it wasn’t because I looked, you know, terrible, as in unhealthy or something. (I am older than I once was, but younger than I’ll be. That’s not unusual.) Honestly, even without masks or unreaped hair we can look different. I’ve seen pictures of people made up for attending a wedding and would never have known it was them if they hadn’t been tagged in the photo on Facebook. And I’ve seen people who’ve long been unwell and they can truly be changed.

That can happen to words, too. It’s a frequent occurrence for people to get a word just slightly wrong. I watched a couple of people lose hundreds of dollars that way on Jeopardy! tonight. If the word is well known, well, it might be recognized anyway; though it won’t win you the money, they’ll know what you’re saying: the overall shape will be close enough – after changes upon changes, words are more or less the same. But if the word is rare, some exotic lexeme from the bibliotechnical jewel box, it might be quite hard to pick out. Sometimes it looks worse, sometimes better, sometimes just… different. And sometimes that can make a whole new word.

Consider katexic. David Foster Wallace used the word in a description of Goran Ivanisevic:

Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking—at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph.

We can guess by context that “looking . . . katexic” means, approximately, “looking like shit.” All that remains to be determined is the specific lexicosemantic scatology. (Just by the way, I worked with a number of Croatians years ago, and overall they were good-looking and healthy. So DFW was just being a dick here. Shocking.)

But if we look up katexic, we do not find it. If we Google it, all we find is articles discussing what the heck it means. It’s sort of like classiomatic: a word that only exists through a misunderstanding, and is only perpetuated by people trying to get their fingers in to unknot it.

But it tickled my mind in just the right way, because I am a weirdo, specifically the kind of weirdo who goes rambling through dictionaries looking for words that crunch in my mouth and mind like snack food. And so I headed right away to my little vignette on cachexy, of which the adjectival form is cachexic. Since the ch is said as “k” you can see how DFW, by dissimilation, could arrive at t for it. (I can also picture an editor putting a note on it: “Is this the right word? Can’t find in dictionary” and DFW writing in response “Get a better dictionary. STET.”) And what does cachexy mean? Malaise. General ill health. Weight loss, muscle atrophy. Feeling – and looking – like caca.

Can we confirm that this is what Wallace wanted? Well, as is pointed out on Wordnik, he used the word again, with one difference in spelling, in Infinite Jest (one of the most accurate book titles going, at least the Infinite part, because most readers never get to the end):

Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own.

This is on page 707, if you want to flip to it in your copy. The setting is a meeting of the Narcotics Anonymous splinter group Cocaine Anonymous. Which really kinda undermines speculations about it coming from katexis, which is normally rendered cathexis now and refers to investing libidinal energy into the mental representation of person or thing. The contexts also don’t work well with an origin tracing to katexoken (also spelled catexochen), meaning ‘preeminently’.

No, I can say with some confidence that, just as a person may be hard to recognize due to some bout of ill health, a word may be hard to recognize because of some fever in the mind of a writer. And so I see this and I say, ah, cachexic – I hardly knew ya!

But since it’s a word, it’s always open to becoming a new word. If vermin and varmint, victuals and vittles, person and parson, can all be the same word cloven in two by reconstrual, so can cachexic and katexic. The consonant dissimilates and so does the word. A little shift of form, a little shift of usage… it’s not as though it’s an actual person with a coherent stream of consciousness…

Thanks to Chris Lott for requesting this word, about which he assembled some bits at katexic.com.

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thou

Posted on January 7, 2021 | 5 comments

When I was young, I thought thou was a term of the greatest respect, so formal and lofty it was reserved only for God (and thus should be Thou). As I got a bit older, I realized that it was also used in Shakespeare and other olde thinges, and I inferred from that that it was poetic and formal and lofty. And so its use was for lofty things, including but not limited to God.

And then I learned the truth.

Many people get through their entire lives never learning the truth about thou. There are people who have lived full educated adult lives whom I have met (and even been related to) who insist on using Thou with God and not with anyone else and would tell you quite hotly that it is inappropriate and demeaning and so on to call God You (let alone you).

Which is how misunderstood old things that have lost their original function become signifiers of adherence to tradition and social subordination. (Looking at you, certain grammatical traditions and certain bibliographic practices. Also some items of clothing.)

You know the truth about thou, right? If you’ve learned French or German or Spanish or any of several other Indo-European languages, you will have learned tu or du or a similar word, depending on the language; they all descend from Proto-Indo-European *túh₂, and they all signify the second person singular… familiar. They’re the word you use for people who are close to you and/or are below or at least equal to you in the social order. I like this video on choosing between du and Sie (‘thou’ and ‘you’) in German:

The short of it is that general usage is leaning ever more towards du, but if someone is older than you and/or less familiar and/or a policeman (!), you should use Sie.

And that’s generally the way of it throughout Western Europe. Respect for monarchs and their various hangers-on and other self-important creeps required using the plural, which in English was (and is) you. (It used to be ye and you like I and me or thou and thee, but we stopped using ye and now many of the thou-revering people also believe that ye is a very formal and holy way of addressing People Who Are Definitely Not God.) 

In much of Western Europe, this distinction remains a bedevilment and a cause for awkward self-conscious social navigation, but in England they at last cut the Gordian knot and treated everyone like kings and queens. Just about the only people who insisted on using thou with every singular person were the people who refused to dress ostentatiously or do “hat honour” – taking off one’s headwear in the presence of a social superior – or anything else that signified inequality of persons: the Quakers. (Modern-day Quakers – of whom I know a few – are still focused on being humble and down-to-earth, but they use you; thou has become ostentatious.)

Not all Western European societies went with the formal/familiar distinction, I should say. The Celtic languages and cultures have reliably kept the singular form for everyone – in Irish, you can address the head of the government or a priest or even the best footballer in the nation as tú if you’re talking to just the one of them. And the same holds true in Icelandic; it’s not just that the language has changed little over the past millennium, it’s that when the courtly norms of politeness were being established in Western Europe, the newspapers (and pretty much anything else) weren’t being delivered to Iceland. So, again, everyone from lowest to highest, lover to stranger, is þú when addressed individually.

Which, incidentally, is the Old English form – well, þu without the accent. It got respelled due to various orthographic changes and then repronounced due to various vowel shifts, all of which I talk about in a presentation I gave a while ago.

So how did God come to be thou? Well, in the original source texts (Greek and Hebrew, and the secondary Latin), God was addressed using the second-person singular, which was taken as indicating a very close, even intimate relationship (quite the opposite of what many “conservative” Christians envision today, which fuels the confusion). As it happens, that’s also the kind of relationship that the 20th-century philosopher Martin Buber described as ideal not only between human and deity but between any human and any other human – or any other thing at all. He made a distinction between ich–es (I–it) relationships, in which one views the other as an object, separate from oneself, and ich–du (I–thou in translation, not I–you), in which one has an actual personal relationship with the other without hard boundaries, recognizing the other as a potential I (and the other does not have to be a person, either). Effectively ich–es is the way of atomism and ich–du is the way towards monism.

I am definitely in favour of ich–du relations, though I am not especially better than many another in creating and existing in them. But I think this would be a good year to focus on such. After all, it’s 2021, and the 20th letter is tand the 21st letter is u, so 2021 is the year of tu, which means also du and thou and the rest. It’s a year to be casual and friendly and open – to the extent permitted by circumstances, of course. Oh, and then we can keep it up in 2022 and beyond.

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A day in the life of an editor

Posted on January 3, 2021 | 3 comments

So you want to be an editor? Are you ready for the editor’s life? Are you ready to hoist your pen (I mean computer), haul up the manuscript, and brave the waves of prose?

Or maybe you’re already an editor, but you’re in-house and want to try freelance, or vice versa?

Let me tell you how to live a day in the life of an editor, in-house versus freelance.

I should say, first, that I worked for more than 20 years in-house in corporate environments, 18 of that in the same company. Then I left (of my own accord, I’ll have you know, and they were sad to see me go; they remain a client of mine). Now I am a freelance editor, and have been for a few years. (I also edited freelance on the side while working in-house during the day, but that’s not the same thing at all.) On top of all that, I know quite a few other editors, and occasionally I hear from them about how they live their lives. So I’m in a good position to talk about what your day will look like as a professional editor, whether in-house or freelance.

Of course other editors will read this and say “You missed something!” or “That’s not how my day goes!” or “Who do you think you are?” I look forward to seeing their comments about their own experience, and you should read those too.

Right. Let’s go. Here’s the agenda.

  1. How to get out of bed
  2. How to have breakfast
  3. How to dress
  4. How to commute
  5. How to plan your day and week
  6. How to manage your desk
  7. How to decide what work to take on
  8. How to track time, bill, and get paid
  9. How to socialize
  10. How to take a vacation
  11. How to spend non-work time
  12. How to go to bed
  13. How to be an editor
Continue reading →

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Some advice for a would-be author

Posted on January 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Occasionally a friend or family member will be talking with someone who wants to publish their writing and the friend or family member suggests they ask me for advice. I’ve just sent off an email to one such person, and I think other people might also benefit from the advice (modified a bit to be more general). Now, bear in mind, this is about magazine publishing, and while I’ve had quite a few articles published, I’m not a magazine assigning editor and haven’t ever been one, so some of this advice is second-hand and will benefit from further insight from people who have to field queries, pitches, and submissions regularly. But it’s a start.

The thing I would suggest doing first, when it’s possible, is seeing what magazines your favourite bookstores and newsstands carry in the subject area you have in mind. Then have a look at those magazines and see which ones are publishing pieces of about the length and kind of topic you’re interested in writing. (No matter how interesting a piece is, if a magazine doesn’t have a way to fit it into their lineup of content, they won’t be able to use it.) 

If a magazine looks like it publishes articles of the sort you’re writing, look at its website; there will usually be information on how to submit, or they may want to you to email first just describing yourself and the article and asking if they’d be interested in seeing it. (If they say they don’t accept unsolicited submissions, don’t bother them. They won’t make a special exception for you.) They always want to know what you’ve already published and where. If you have a blog, you can direct them to that and they’ll be able to see what kinds of things you’ve written; also, if you have some idea of how many people read your blog, and the number is large enough, you can mention it to them. Magazines tend to favour authors who bring readers with them! 

Above all, when emailing editors, be friendly and polite, but also concise and to the point—the easier it is to answer an email, the sooner they will probably answer it. So just lead off with a short statement about the article (“Would [magazine] be interested in an article about [X]?”), then describe yourself and your blog and anything relevant you’ve had published elsewhere, and give a bit more detail on the article and why it would be well suited to their magazine (it never hurts to say nice things about the magazine too!), and thank them for their time and say you look forward to hearing from them.

If you feel that your article needs editing before submitting, one thing to bear in mind is that you may have friends who will happily give you advice and tell you things you need to do to it and so on, but unless they have reasonable experience in publishing, their advice may not actually be good advice. Above all, don’t worry too much about tiny points of grammar—although those are the things friends often like to pick on first, the truth is that they’re the easiest things for the magazine to fix, and if you focus too much on them it can often be to the detriment of the larger items such as good structure and storytelling. (Also, many of the “grammatical errors” that many people pick on aren’t errors, and many of their “corrections” make everything worse!) On the other hand, if you pay a professional editor to edit if for you before submitting, you may get good results, but it may cost you more than the magazine will pay you. Some magazines, though, if they see you have a good story that just needs a little structural work, may work with you on it. It really depends on the publication and editor.

Good luck!

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korrekturlust

Posted on December 31, 2020 | 2 comments

We say we don’t like things that are wrong, but in fact we do. We like them in the same way as cats like mice, the same way as hawks like sparrows and the same way as sparrows like snails. In attacking and ablating them we satisfy our hunger. We like errors so much we go out of our way to discern more and more of them by latching onto, and even creating, rules. 

You know it’s true. Hair-splitting distinctions in usage (“You don’t mean persuade, you mean convince!”), grammatical superstitions (“Aigh! That split infinitive is like aluminum foil touching a filling!”), punctuation fetishes (“I could never love a man who uses en-dashes with spaces rather than em-dashes without”)… if we did not adore the bloodlust they inspire and the aggressive acts of correction that follow, we would simply let them slide. We tell ourselves that the adrenal rush we feel at the sight of a perceived error is indignation at a transgression of good and proper order, but putting things back in place requires no sanguinary paroxysm; what we are feeling is what a cat feels at the first sight of a rodent’s tail.

And, as with many a common human feeling that we all know but usually don’t talk about, German has a word for it. German has a reputation for this because German uses single words where English uses whole phrases, and German does this by just sticking whole phrases together and calling them words. It has become a sport among some English speakers to try to confect German words for such excessively human psychological moments. In the case of this word, that is what I did… and then I Googled it, and I found that it truly exists and is used often enough and fully naturally to mean exactly what I hoped it meant. 

Because of course. If any culture is going to have a word for Korrekturlust, we just assume it will be German.

Yes, that’s the word. Korrekturlust. The stress is on the “tur,” not on the “rek,” and if you want to be as close to the German as you can, the u’s should be said as in “tour” (in tur) and “book” (in lust). But I want this word to get borrowed into English, as korrekturlust (because once it’s an English noun it’s not capitalized by default as German nouns are; we write of wanderlust and weltschmerz, where in German those w’s would inspire an immediate desire to make them W’s). So say it as is comfortable for you, because that’s how words make themselves at home.

Korrektur (stress on the “tur”!) means ‘correction’, and I think you can see readily enough that it comes from the same root (Latin correctio). Lust has a broader meaning in German than in English; it means ‘desire’ or ‘joy’ or ‘pleasure’ or ‘satisfaction’. So Korrekturlust means ‘desire to correct’ (and that can imply a very compelling desire) but it can also mean ‘enjoyment of correcting’. And the context of its usage in German clearly shows it as meaning what pedants do – as we see in this little anecdote in which one of the regulars in a pub peeves about seeing an English word on the menu, and the waiter gives a smart reply (which I don’t want to try to translate, as it’s in a regional variety of German and also has a local cultural reference). The author comments,

Damit hatte der Kumpel alle grammatikalischen, orthografischen und sonstigen Spatzen gefangen, die Korrekturlust eines Pedanten besänftigt, den überzeugt und Frieden übers Stammtischleben gebracht.

Which means “With this, Buddy had caught all the grammatical, orthographic and other sparrows, calmed the pedant’s Korrekturlust, convinced him and brought peace to the regulars’ table.”

Now, enjoyment of correcting would seem to be a good thing for an editor or a writer, no? And indeed I can tell you that copyediting and proofreading is like gardening: the weeding can be oh so satisfying. But some gardeners get a bit out of hand and start pulling up perfectly good flowers or doing other things that cause more harm than good. And if language were gardens, there would be random people who aren’t even gardeners stepping onto the lawns of strangers to rip out their rose beds for being the wrong colour. 

We would do well to heed this item in a list of “five traps for teachers” reproduced in an article on how to help refugees:

Korrekturlust: Wir müssen nicht jeden Fehler korrigieren und dadurch zeigen, wie klug wir sind. Es geht nicht um Korrektheit…

That means “Korrekturlust: We don’t have to correct every mistake and thereby show how smart we are. It’s not about correctness…”

And if it’s a trap for teachers, it’s certainly a worse trap for anyone else. Upbraiding someone in casual communication for a small error when they didn’t ask you to is minimally helpful and maximally rude. It’s aggressive behaviour that, regardless of the excuse one invents for it, is designed to assert social dominance. And, as such, it is behaviour that is badly in need of correction. If you are so fully possessed by korrekturlust, may I recommend going and getting some correction porn – perhaps cheaply published books by long-dead authors, so you can’t be tempted to convey your corrections to anyone – and satisfying your desire in the private quiet of your own abode.

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ibidem, tessera

Posted on December 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

This word belongs to a small set of words that are virtually never spelled out in full, and many of those who know the abbreviation don’t even know the full form (videlicet is another; you probably know it as viz., if you know it at all). And, in its abbreviated form, ibid., it is (also like viz.) a tessera word.

What do I mean by tessera word? Say you get a coin in your change, and you don’t recognize it. You think it’s from some country you can’t identify, or perhaps it’s a token from some fancy arcade, and you don’t know what it’s worth, so you give it away, or you throw it away, or you put it somewhere, but you don’t use it, because you don’t know how or where to use it. But you see ones like it every so often, and people seem to use them, and everyone who uses them acts like everyone knows what they’re for. No one ever tells you. Eventually you get to know someone who invites you to join them somewhere – it could be a place that’s new to you, or it could be somewhere you’ve been before but they go to a different entrance than the one you’re used to – and they pull out one of those coins and put it in a slot and go in. Aha! At last you know. Well, a tessera word is like that.

A tessera is a token, or a password, or a token used as a password. Its name comes directly from Greek τέσσερα ‘four’, because originally tesseras were quadrilateral (i.e., rectangular, perhaps square; tessera is also used to refer to other square things, such as mosaic tiles). They were used for such things as the equivalent of a theatre ticket in the theatre. A tessera of hospitality was a ceramic piece broken in two, one kept by host, one by guest, to allow recognition (I’m fantasizing a circumstance where the parties are masked, but I suppose it could just be a matter of the host having a staff member let you in). And a tessera word is one that is known by an in-group, and knowledge of it allows you to function as part of that in-group.

That’s not to say that tessera words are pointedly kept as in-group knowledge. Often it’s just a matter of everyone who knows them assuming that those who need to know them will know them – which also means, though they might avoid reflecting on it, that the words are useful exclusionary devices.

Scholarly writing has an assortment of expectations and practices, and among the more exacting and exclusionary are the referencing standards. There are multiple standards you can follow, and while variations are possible within each standard, it is expected that you will know certain things. If I am reading a scholarly work and see “(Norris, Between 19)” I am supposed to know that it is using MLA style and that I should look into the list of works cited to find a work by an author whose last name is Norris and having a title featuring the word Between, and I will find the quoted material on page 19. And if I am reading a scholarly work (a different one, to be sure) and I see a footnote or endnote and I look at it and see “Ibid., 19” or just “Ibid.” I am supposed to know…

…do you know what you’re supposed to know? I didn’t when I first met it and for some years after. In fact, I assumed it was some oft-cited work, like the Iliad or the Aeneid or whatnot. Something encyclopedic, I guess, since it was lending support to all sorts of things. It sure would be nice to have a work like that that one could cite (and no, I don’t mean Wikipedia, try to avoid citing Wikipedia; it’s very useful but it’s not authoritative or a primary source – follow its citations in turn to find something you can use). And I’d happily put “scitur” for “it is known,” or “omnibus notum” for “everybody knows,” or “scilicet” for “obviously,” but the problem with those is that they are not known – almost nobody knows them – and they are not obvious. Whereas “ibid.” is at least broadly known among scholars.

It – ibidem – means ‘in the same place’. It’s Latin, of course. It means “just look up at the previous note and see what work was cited there, and that’s the one we mean here too.” In other words, “we expect you to know this already.” The point of it is to save space, so you don’t have to put even an abbreviated reference there.

But it’s a nuisance. It’s a nuisance not just because it has to be learned like any tessera word, and not just because you have to look up at the previous note (and sometimes there’s a stack of ibid.s several notes long, and if they’re footnotes you may have to flip back pages, and if it’s online you may have extra clicking to do), but because any change to the footnote order in revisions ruins it. It’s like if you’re having a conversation with someone who’s behind you in the line for the bar at a reception, and you don’t notice that they’ve moved on and you’re now talking to someone else, and maybe handing a drink to them too. Generally this means that if a book’s going to use ibid., the author should not use it at any point in the writing or revising process, and the copyeditor will go through once the footnotes are definitely not going to be revised further and put it in everywhere it’s needed.

Or, you know, just not put it in. The abbreviated forms of citations are not so horribly long, and they’re clearer too. The style manual that has most upheld the ibid. tradition, The Chicago Manual of Style, says the following in its most recent (17th) edition (chapter 14, section 34):

In a departure from previous editions, Chicago discourages the use of ibid. in favor of shortened citations as described elsewhere in this section; to avoid repetition, the title of a work just cited may be omitted. Shortened citations generally take up less than a line, meaning that ibid. saves no space, and in electronic formats that link to one note at a time, ibid. risks confusing the reader.

(Now let’s have a chat, can we, Chicago, about place of publication in citations…)

Of course, if we discard ibid., we’re left with a tessera word we can’t use anymore. Which is actually a good thing, since accessibility improves scholarship. But it does mean that people who are looking at older works that use it will have to find out what it means. Fortunately, they can always look it up.

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