People who write in library books deserve to be stabbed with their pencils. On the other hand, while it makes reading the original much harder, a certain kind of annotation is guaranteed to add comic relief to the driest of academic prose.
And indeed, Dutch translations of tricky idiomatic phrases such as “a preliminary stab at” (“inleidende poging tot”) or words like “iconoclasm” (“schoppen tegen establishment”) might be quite useful, for an essay in a Dutch library. On the other hand it’s a Dutch philosophy department library, so I would hope that not everyone needs the final two paragraphs bracketed and “more and more general; conclusion” helpfully added in the margin.
The paper is Donald Davidson’s A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,1 on the problems that malapropisms pose for Davidson’s theory of language. On the eighth page I find the marginal note “Who is Mrs Malaprop?”, and indeed reading back it seems she’s introduced with “…I thought that the word ‘malaprop’, though the name of Sheridan’s character,…”. I hope my anonymous annotator figured it out in the end, since it adds a lot to the central notion of the essay.
(They seem to have been rather hasty with the pencil; in the following essay the phrase “ketches and yawls” is given underlining and a question-mark, although it’s immediately followed by a definition.)
I must confess that I’m still mystified by one addition though: the word “proposal” is heavily circled in the sentence “Here is a highly simplified and idealized proposal about what goes on.” My inner reading voice pronounces this as “Here is a highly simplified and idealized PROPOSAL about what goes on,” and my PROPOSAL for whoever is responsible is that they CEASE, immediately and forthwith, WRITING in LIBRARY BOOKS.
Notes:
- I got out of bed at sparrow-fart this morning for our reading group discussion, only to discover that it’s next week. [↪]
6 Comments
I really enjoy writing in my books. But then those are my books.
Next time I’m over Im going to buy you a second hand book and circle random words leaving you to ponder just why the previous owner was so concerned by such trivialities.
Jacob: sure, that’s different. I just read an essay of Stephen Jay Gould where he talks about a Russian naturalist whose library was destroyed in the fires after Napoleon took Moscow — among the books he lost was a Linnaeus with 40 years worth of his own annotations… Tragic. (Excuse the shaky detail, the book is of course at home.)
Rob: If you do it in pencil I’ll forgive you (and buy an eraser). I might even have some suggestions as to what you should look out for…
What do you think about that:
Today I have been reading chapter 6 of the book “Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language” by Bjorn Ramberg (borrowed from the same library, i.e. the library of the Philosophy department) and, on the second page already, I noticed that in the sentence “The interpreter in this situation has nothing to go on but what she sees the native speakers do and the sounds she hears them utter”, there was a line drawn over the first “she” (and a faint line over the second one which I only saw now). The first thought that came into mind was that this was done accidentally. Turning to the next page, I realized that this was not the case… In the whole first half of the chapter, the (very nasty and obviously too masculine) reader has patiently turned most of the occurences of the word “she” to “he” by crossing out the “s” and he even turned some “her”s to “his”s! Shall I, being a female, take it as an insult? Or is it the case that indeed we shouldn’t believe that women can possibly be intepreters? I don’t know. And I am realy wondering what intetions might be hidden behind this behaviour.
Moral: People who write in library books deserve to be stabbed with their pencils indeed!
Hah, that’s so antisocial it’s actually funny!
Yeah, actually this is why I am wondering what the hidden intentions are. It might as well be that whoever did this, did it just for fun or for putting people like me in thoughts and I really hope this is the case!