Dote on Me, Please, Part 2

…the church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Hagia Sophia is “one of the chief monuments of architecture in the world.” Justinian's wife, who had been a “dancing girl” prior to their marriage, is the alleged source of many of the “Anecdota”; some consider the book to be more fiction than fact. But the name of the book contributed to the establishment of the word anecdote. It is what developed the meaning of “revelation of secrets” which had “decayed” in English to “brief, amusing stories” by 1761.

Etymonline then contains another reference, to De Quincey’s 1823 coinage (“jocular formation” according to etymonline) of the word anecdotage, which it calls “garrulous old age”. It is a portmanteau word (in itself another word to discuss later) formed from anecdote and dotage. As I get older I catch myself engaged in more anecdotage, or the telling of sometimes uninteresting stories from my memory.

De Quincey was an English author who was most famous for his book “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (he was addicted to it for most of his life), used the word first in the line “All history, therefore, being built partly, and some of it altogether, upon anecdotage, must be a tissue of lies.”

Which brings us to dotage. The word came to English about 1300 when it was created from the Middle English word doten and has no known history before Middle English. It now (and since the late 14th century) means “feeble and childish state due to old age; senility” (see blog on 5/23/10) and less commonly but more originally “a doting; foolish or excessive affection.”

In the first part of this two-part blog I mentioned the word whit, which is almost always used in a phrase that includes the words “not a whit”. Whit is an early Modern English respelling of the word wiht, because to us and my spellcheck wiht looks wrong. Etymonline.com ignores the spelling issue, simply detailing that in the 12th century the phrase in na whit, meaning “in no amount”, was used, and came from the Old English nan wiht, where wiht meant amount, having once meant person or human being (from which the obsolete and archaic word wight came, so why bring it up except to add that the Isle of Wight has a completely different etymology?) Whit now has come to mean “the least bit; jot; iota.”

Of course, to use jot and iota together is redundant. Jot is the Latin transliteration of the name of the Greek letter iota, which when it gets to English is the letter “i”. The word jot is used in the King James Version of the Bible in Matthew 5:18 where it says “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Which raises the question “What’s a tittle?”

A tittle is now what you would call the dot on a lower case i or j. It has been used to refer to various small marks to distinguish letters in some way.

And that, certainly, is enough anecdotage.