And the word of the day is: Homoioteleuton (ho-mee-oh-te-loot’-on)
Roughly, “same ending”. A homoioteleuton is two lines of text in which the ending is the same. For example:
1 The very tall man was walking
2 down the well-lit city street
3 where the woman was talking
4 to a little girl.
During the copying of manuscripts, this can result in recognizable kind of copying error: Skipping a section of the text.
In this example, if you’re copying the text, it would be easy to skip lines 2 & 3. You copy line 1, and when your eyes go back to the page, you accidentally go back to the end of line 3 instead of the end of line 1. You end up with “The very tall man was walking to a little girl.”
This can be very useful to textual critics, trying to figure out which manuscript has the original reading. If you have two manuscripts (A and B), and A reads 1,4 while B reads 1,2,3,4, you can be pretty sure what happened. “Oh,” you say, “the scribe skipped those lines because of the similar ending homoioteleuton.”
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Hmmm…okay…I take back my tongue-in-cheek comment about the previous word of the day…
I actually DO think your “theology word of the day” posts are informative, and thus worthy of your blog…
…you have my permission to carry on…
😀
🙂
I’m not sure how often I’ll do these. It should probably be called “Theology Word of the Oh-look-Tim-found-another-fun-word-to-talk-about.”