Someone in our List asked me about the meaning of "apud" I often add when referring to an author's quotes. To my surprise I couldn't find entries for it in the dictionaries I consulted and neither Wikipedia and other on-line tools in English were of help.Finally I tracked an example for its use ( as the one I had in mind) by Thomas Carlyle.
//snip
... was the saying of an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” lib. iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.—Ibid. sect. 5.

I always thought that "apud", in English texts, was regularly used. "Sorry, my latinism is showing"...
Jansy
.
Jansy: I too enjoyed an early (1941-7) exposure to ‘the Latin’ -- back then, it was compulsory for the Open Entrance Scholarhips to Oxbridge *. O Tempus F**kit. One possible reason ‘apud’ has not survived as sturdily as other Latin editorial apparati (i.e., i.e. [id est]; viz. [videlicet]; q.v. [quod vide]; ibid. [ibidem]; sic; et al. [et allii/et alliae/et allia] **; etc. [et cetera]; etc!) could be that ‘apud’ (also spelled ‘aput’) is one of those excessively ambiguous prepositions (not that the Englih have any right to complain):
at; by; near; with; among; in; before; at the home of; in the time ofl; and FINALLY: in the works of!

• This applied to all candidate streams: classics, modern languages/literature, history, science, mathematics. I mean to check if VN and his brother had to take any Entrance Exams for admission to  Cambridge. ‘Speak Memory’ doesn’t seem to mention such hurdles, and I don’t have Brian Boyd’s earlier bio [VNTRY] at hand. It’s unlikely that VN or bro,’ as ‘fee-payers,’ needed ‘vetting-in-Latin’ in the 1920s.
  

Taking SES’s advice, may I conflate (it’s legal between consenting adults) comments on another concurrent thread?


VERSE or POETRY?

or Uncle Stan’s Bland Guide to Semantics!

1. Words usually start life with reasonably narrow, useful semantic spreads. Otherwise, they tend to lapse into desuetude. (The Word Museums drip with nonce archaisms vainly awaiting transfusions.) Over time and space, the meanings of the survivors can & do multiply & shift, usually with no rational explanations. Seek meanings from ‘agreed community usage’ and context’ -- not from sound, shape, spelling, and etymology. Easy for me (or anyone) to say!
2. Etymology is to Linguistics as Plumbing is to Hydrodynamics,
3. Proof of the quirks & mysteries of semantic shift is the existence of thousands of ‘self-antonyms’ (also called ‘auto-antonyms’ but avoid Galenus’s confusing ‘antilogy’ ) -- words which can also validly carry their ‘opposite’ meaning (common examples: cleft/let/dust/fix/oversight/qualified/ravel/vegetate. They exist in most languages. _Apud_: The Computer Contradictionary, SKB, MIT Press, 1995; p. 17; the first edition was The Devil’s DP Dictionary, SKB, McGraw-Hill, 1981). These auto-antonyms are supplemented by the weirdness of IRONY. “Swine! You say one thing and mean another!”
4. Dictionaries are useful descriptive summaries of past and current meanings/usages but even electronic gadgetry (e.g., OED3) cannot fully track emerging shifts, volatile jargon, and fly-by-day neologisms. Consult several. Use with care.
5. The curse of NL (Natural Language): words are ‘defined’ using other words, which are ‘defined’ using other words ... are there any lexical MONADS or ‘atoms’ that must somehow remain undefined and ‘taken as read?’ Think of all the essential but almost-unnoticed ‘grammatical’ words that cement the concrete words into defining semantic units: ‘if’ ‘and’ ‘but’ ‘some’ ‘all’ ... and pause to ponder that some languages get by without ‘the’ ‘a’ and ‘is!’ A commonsense escape from both monads and infinite regresses &/or endless loops (related but distinct concepts) is the patient HUMAN group interaction between users and ‘usees’ (see e.g., Walter Miale’s helpful enumerational approach: offering suggested examples to clarify his own understanding of verse vs poetry.)
6. The ‘curse’ can be exaggerated into a deep despair that human-linguistic communications are forever doomed and saddled with irreducible ambiguities. But we do surprisingly well. My own love-affair with all things Nabokovian (extending beyond the teasing texts to the Nansen passport photographs of Vera & Dmitri [SM p. 294] — would you believe real fireworks are exploding outside? — remember, remember it’s the 5th of November — chez nous we celebrate the evisceration of a guy called Fawkes — it’s the only language these terrorists understand) -- but I digress. VN-as-novelist exploits NL’s ambiguity; VN-as-taxonomist strives to conquer NK’s ambiguity
7. Applying these ‘rules’: VERSE seems to start off as a LINE (based on the unit of a turning plough metaphor — reminding me of the wonderful ‘boustrophedon’ where you plough/write alternatively from left-to-right and right-to-left; time-saving for oxen and serial-printers); whence ‘verse’ moves to ‘a part of a text’ (e.g., the Biblical Chapter and Verse) or a specific physical line of poetry, thence via metonomy to the whole poem. At some stage, we see VERSIFYING being applied with a touch of derog. to an activity somewhat less skilled than the art of writing poetry. In fact, in the Biblical analogy, the Scriptures were divided and numbered not by the inspired [sic] authors but by mere VERSIFIERS — a boon to the pulpit thumpers. Note a related value down-shift: POETESS used to be a natural descriptor for Sappho or Vera N. As with AUTHORESS, we now find such gendering distasteful. I also have a feeling that POETIZE or even worse, POETICIZING, has grown an offensive aura, although my Penguin Dictionary gives them as harmless synonyms for ‘adding a poetical quality.’  We prefer to say that what Poets do is ‘write Poetry’ -- saying that ‘X poeticizes’ seems as sarcastic as ‘X versifies?’ Elsewhere, I have extended the notion of IRREGULR VERBS:
   

I market/you sell/he-she peddles. I extrapolate/you conjecture/he-she guesses.

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