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Apr 30, 2007
This week's themeWords about words This week's words haplography obiter dictum asyndeton verbigeration brachylogy Previous week’s theme Words having vowels aeiou once and only once, and in order 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargSearch the Web for 'Missippi' and you'd find thousands of hits showing pages where the authors clearly meant Mississippi. With the advent of modern computers and spell-checkers you'd think this illustration of haplography would not occur so often. If you feel this is bad, imagine the time before the printing press came along, when the only way to make copies of a book was with a quill and parchment. There were no photocopying machines to crank out double-sided copies. Biblical translations and copies of other books from olden times are replete with haplography and its cousins. Many scholars spend their lifetime identifying these 'bugs' in ancient books and other scripts. A counterpart of haplography is haplology. Haplology occurs when one 'eats' a few letters while pronouncing a word. Latin nutrix (nurse) came from an earlier word, nutritrix. Chancery, a contraction of chancellery, is now an acceptable part of the English language. Perhaps some day 'probly' will be considered standard and 'probably' obsolete! If there are some words that economize on letters, there are others which splurge. The word for this phenomenon is called dittography. This week we'll see a few more words about words. haplography(hap-LOG-ruh-fee) noun: Accidental omission of a letter or letter group that should be repeated in writing, for example, "mispell" for "misspell". [From Greek haplo- (single, simple) + -graphy (writing).]
"In the apparatus of Trounce's edition, dittography occurs at line 266,
haplography at line 352, and there are numerous erasures and corrections
within the text." X-BonusThe older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much. -Germain G. Glien |
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