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Sunday, June 11, 2006

Familiar Foreign Words

Posted by Jonathan Goodwin on 06/11/06 at 11:46 AM

Here are those that are not italicized according to the 13th edition:

effendi
pasha
élan
barranca
remuda
trattoria
mea culpa
fazenda
ménage
weltschmerz
kappellmeister
a priori

And the 15th:

pasha
weltanschauung
in vitro
a priori
recherché
the kaiser
de novo
eros and agape

I wonder how many of those from the 13th (or is it thirteenth? I really can’t look it up at the moment) are holdovers.

Comments

Editions of the CMS?

By ben wolfson on 06/12/06 at 02:50 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Editions of the CMS.

By Jonathan Goodwin on 06/12/06 at 07:47 AM | Permanent link to this comment

What are the years?

The unfamiliar ones are:

effendi: Turkish honorific
barranca: golf term unfamiliar to me
remuda: cowboy term
fazenda: Brazilian for “hacienda” (actully I knew this one, but it seems quite obscure)

By John Emerson on 06/12/06 at 08:47 AM | Permanent link to this comment

That’s the Chicago Manual of Style, readers. I probably wouldn’t have figured it out had I not seen Jonathan all around the house poring over it, even (perhaps especially) while watching Battlestar Galactica.

By Clancy Ratliff on 06/12/06 at 09:54 AM | Permanent link to this comment

And he couldn’t have informed us of this from the get-go because...?

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 06/13/06 at 10:55 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Young Wolfson seemed to get it easily enough.

By Jonathan Goodwin on 06/13/06 at 11:07 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Yes, but life isn’t a dull trivia contest. Why invite people to skim through multiple editions of manuals of style? Is this what happens at dinner parties of the young and untenured?

“I’m thinking of an edition of the MLA between one and five. Quick! Which one has a footnote contingently endorsing British-style comma-placement in foreign editions of books not available in the US?”

“Second!”

“Oh Gregory, you stinker. You’re guessing again. That takes all the fun out of it!”

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 06/13/06 at 11:16 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I was pointing out an oddity from an older edition, namely that its list of familiar foreign phrases not to be italicized are not, for the most part, very familiar. If you don’t like it, there’s a useful Kriss Kross lyric I can recommend.

By Jonathan Goodwin on 06/13/06 at 11:23 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I’m not in the mood to jump, nor jump for that matter. I got that you were pointing out an oddity from an older edition of something, but the point is, you didn’t indicate what it was an older edition of. It could’ve been anything with a 13<sup>th</sup> and 15<sup>th</sup> edition which, in your studies, you noticed italicized some words in the former but not in the latter. That “according to” could easily mean “as demonstrated by.” As impressed by your erudition as I am, I wonder whether your archness is an unintentional product of it, or whether it’s by design.

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 06/14/06 at 07:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I don’t think that Scott has the wherewithal to be an effective pedant eccentric.

By John Emerson on 06/14/06 at 07:24 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Perhaps, but in the future, Brods will mourn my fiery complaints.

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 06/14/06 at 07:30 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Oh, that’s not it, that’s not it at all.

Could it really have been anything? I don’t think so. I wanted to dedicate this post to all of those about to convert an article from MLA to Chicago.

By Jonathan Goodwin on 06/14/06 at 08:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment

A non-argumentative note.

‘Effendi’ has one of the more interesting etymologies in the language, from ‘authentikos’.

By Conrad H. Roth on 06/17/06 at 06:46 PM | Permanent link to this comment