Dote on Me, Please, Part 1

I recently heard what was either a mispronunciation or a misuse of the word anecdote. It is not an easy word to pronounce since it contains an unusual consonant cluster that contains an unvoiced velar stop followed by a voiced dental/alveolar stop, which is a pedantic (blog posting 1/18/10) way of saying that’s not easy to pronounce. Now that I’ve made that pronouncement, let’s get back on topic.

The word antidote, which is easier to pronounce, was used when the speaker should have said anecdote. It’s not the first time I have heard the replacement, so let’s make sure the difference is understood, and in the process go through ancient Greece, visit Emporer Justinian, stop off and visit the English writer De Quincey before I get to my dotage.

The word antidote is simply understood from its etymology. Most of us know that anti- as a prefix means “against”. So what’s the –dote? We have to go back through the Latin word antidotum, which was taken from the Greek word antidoton, literally translated as ”given against”. The word is a Greek verbal adjective formed from the word antididonai, which means “give in return”. The –didonai means “to give”. Antidote was first used in English in the 1510s, although if we can identify the decade I don’t know why we can’t identify the year. An antidote, according to my New World Dictionary, is “a remedy to counteract a poison” or anything that “works against an evil or unwanted condition.”

The word anecdote also has two definitions. The first uses anecdote as a plural word meaning “originally, little known, entertaining facts of history of biography,” and second “a short, entertaining account of some happening, usually personal or biographical.” My dictionary’s etymology for the word is bland: it came to English from French, which got it from the Middle English word anecdota, which came from the Greek anekdota, the neuter plural of the word for unpublished (anekdotos). Anekdotos was formed from an-, meaning “not”, and ekdotos, which is a form of the word ekdidonai (give out), created from the words ek-, meaning “out” and didonai, (see above) meaning “to give”.

That’s the bland etymology. Etymonline has much more interesting information. While it disagrees not a whit (another word we'll get to later) with my dictionary on the actual etymology, it adds that it came to English in the 1670s and originally meant “secret or private stories.” Then it refers to Procopius’ sixth century book “Anecdota”, which were the unpublished memoirs of the Emporer Justinian.

Emporer Justinian had, according to www.newadvent.org, a historic reign: “The thirty-eight years of Justinian's reign are the most brilliant period of the later empire.” He codified what had become disparate sets of laws throughout the Roman Empire into one Corpus Juris Civilis, which has become “the basis of civil law in every civilized country.” It was also during his reign that the architectural style known as Byzantine was perfected, and he was responsible for the building of the church of Our Lady in Jerusalem (now known as the El-Aqsa mosque) and…