{"id":53577,"date":"2022-02-13T08:35:21","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T13:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=53577"},"modified":"2022-02-13T09:00:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T14:00:05","slug":"recte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=53577","title":{"rendered":"Recte!"},"content":{"rendered":"

M. Paul Shore called my attention to a highly useful Latin expression that, in his opinion, is much needed in various scholarly communities, but that few people are aware of, much less use.<\/p>\r\n

Paul writes:<\/p>\r\n

For the last four-and-a-half decades of my life, from late teens to early sixties, I've had the nagging feeling that there ought to be a Latin scholarly expression that one could use when presenting the correction of an erroneous word or words in quoted material alongside<\/em> the error itself. But in all my tens of thousands of pages of reading of scholarly works in the social sciences and humanities (which is not to be compared, of course, with the hundreds of thousands of pages, or more, that you must've read), I never ran across such an expression until last night, when I saw it in independent scholar Nigel Simeone\u2019s meticulously annotated book of selected correspondence of Leonard Bernstein, published by Yale University Press. There it was, in black and white: recte<\/em>! Meaning, of course, \u201ccorrectly\u201d, as in \u201cVictor Mare [recte<\/em> Mair]\u201d, or \u201cEdwin Pullyblank [recte<\/em> Pulleyblank]\u201d. It\u2019s so exciting to discover this, after all these decades of desiring it, that I almost feel like applying to a graduate program at my somewhat advanced age, choosing a thesis or dissertation topic that requires the use of lots of defective sources, just so that I can splash \u201crecte<\/em>\u201c on as many pages of my work as possible.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

Needless to say, the usefulness of other vaguely similar expressions and techniques, insofar as mistake correction is concerned, doesn\u2019t come close to the usefulness of this particular expression. \u201cI.e.<\/em>\u201c is too vague, not making it clear in all apposite circumstances, even when there\u2019s a proper context, that it\u2019s specifically a mistake correction that\u2019s occurred. \u201cSc.<\/em>\u201d and \u201cviz.<\/em>\u201d are no better. Putting the correction in square brackets tends to require the obliteration of the original mistake, doing away with the desirable side-by-side comparison. \u201cSic<\/em>\u201d indicates the presence of a mistake, but leaves no scope for correcting that mistake other than by the addition of a wordy explanatory phrase. One could of course use the English word \u201crightly\u201d or \u201ccorrectly\u201d, or some multi-word explanation, to introduce the correction, but those lack the terse, formalized quality, as well as the attention-getting italics and language switch, that taken together are so advantageous in the execution of a basic and frequently-needed scholarly operation like correcting an error. In short, recte<\/em> is greatly superior to its alternatives\u2014and yet so few people know about it!<\/p>\r\n

I agree with Saul [recte<\/em> Paul] that this is an elegant, efficient way to signal the need for a change in a text and to specify the change that should be made.<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n