Skip to main content

et al.

I don't know how many people pay attention to the references and bibilographies tucked away in the tail end of the books they read. I've always found them fascinating, hints that there are more and more books to read. An infinite series of words to track down. When a book has multiple authors, you'll often see the primary author's name followed by "et al." This is short for a Latin expression meaning "and others". The trouble is, in Latin you have the masculine "et alii", feminine "et aliae" and neuter "et alia", and I don't know which you'd use for a group of mixed gender. Conveniently, "et al." can also be use for "et alibi" ("and other places"), so by all accounts, that little "et al." is a handy kind of shorthand.

Note that the word "alibi" has its legal meaning of being somewhere else (at the moment of a crime), but it is also used in common speech for having any excuse at all, right down to the dog eating your homework.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A STORY about STOREY

Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story.  I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be.  I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING.  Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out.  But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor).  A taller building could have multiple STOREYS.  Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version.  Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

Similar but Not: Byre/Bier

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Post a Comment
Read more