#obelise

[catilinas]

help you got squished

augghh my exclamation point has been obelised

[aeide-thea]

wrt the aforementioned ‘notorious’ tacitean passage, my commentary notes that a particular phrasing was ‘obelised’ by a previous editor, which wasn't a word i'd ever encountered before; this was startling both because i know most english words there are to know (look, it's not self-aggrandizing if it's just true), and because this one is such a Peak Classics word: google glosses it as meaning ‘mark (a word or passage) with an obelus to show that it is spurious, corrupt, or doubtful.’

anyway i also didn't exactly know what an obelus was, although clearly it was, you know, one of those marks deployed by editors, so i proceeded to google that while i was about it and learned another thing, which is that apparently the term refers both (1) to the Dagger Symbol of Dubiousness with which i was visually familiar, and also (2) to the division sign? which latter siglum also, i learned recently in the course of some procrastinatory reading-up on paleography, signifies est in tironian shorthand.

said shorthand continued to be used by, inter alios, monks in the british isles—google books has some nice clear examples of the est-obelus in an eighth century manuscript from canterbury—and so it is that one still, apparently, sees the tironian et (⁊) on modern irish signage! this is also apparently the reason videlicet gets abbreviated ‘viz.’ despite being devoid of zeds: it was actually originally vi⁊ (vi—et, essentially), but the ⁊ ultimately got conflated with the more familiar Z. the more you know...!

[anadromeo]

Tweeted

Stephanie played today's #4 #RarestWord: OBELISE for 29pts, def'n at https://t.co/eEhQfJDUh2 #game #scrabble #playmath pic.twitter.com/3zJ26IGllZ

— Anadrome (@anadromeo) December 22, 2019

[anadromeo]

Tweeted:

Stephanie played today's #4 #RarestWord: OBELISE for 29pts, def'n at https://t.co/eEhQfJDUh2 #game #scrabble #playmath pic.twitter.com/3zJ26IGllZ

— Anadrome (@anadromeo) December 22, 2019

via https://twitter.com/anadromeo December 22, 2019 at 06:00AM