As a failed literati of sorts (all those unwritten and therefore unpublished books), one never loses one's fascination for the little words that inveigle their way into English usage. They are ubiquitous, crop up in the unlikeliest of places, and read...and then forgotten, never to be looked up. You kind of guess what they mean, but they are just too insignificant, not be glorified through dictionary trawling or by daily usage.
One such word is (sic).
Yes, the word, if one may call a mere slip of three letters that, is only used in brackets, and is often italicised.
I have come across it many times, but never looked it up...until today, when I stumbled upon it while reading a medical paper. The author was quoting an article that used a term incorrectly, and reproduced it verbatim, but postfaced it with a (sic).
Here's an easy to understand example- an excerpt from Bloomberg in 2015, "This proved too much for Robert Barnett, the Washington superlawyer and long time adviser to the Clintons, who fired off an e-mail lighting into her senior staff: "STOP IT!!!! I have help [sic] my tongue for weeks. ..."
It is easy to understand that the user is highlighting an error in the text, but using the suffix to indicate that he has left it unaltered, just so that you don't get the idea that he can't spell...
But what on earth does (sic). mean? I mean, literally?
Here it gets interesting. People have virtually come to blows on its derivation, and it took me a while to make some sense of this little, 3-letter monster.
A popular explanation is that (sic) is part of "Sic transit Gloriam", or "There, but for the grace of God, go I". The implication obviously being, thank goodness, I am not a scatterbrain like the chap I am quoting.
A linguist begs to differ. He thinks Sic is short for Sicut, a Latin word which, for those familiar with Latin choral works, crops up in Sicut erat in principio... or 'As it was in the beginning'.
The Americans like to keep things simple. Notice how they got rid of the "a" in aetiology or the "u" in favourite (thus, unfortunately disembowelling one of the only two words in English that boast all five vowels)? It was therefore not particularly surprising to come across two American gentlemen, respectively from PA & CA, expand (sic) as Spelling InCorrect, and Stated In Context.
Others followed with "Something is changed" and "Standard Idiom Communique"...Whew! Who would have thunk (sic) a little itsy bitsy word would have so many fathers?
The term was apparently used to describe George Bush Junior's bloopers as Stupid Incoming Comments..
But my quest had to end somewhere. It seems (sic) is simply Latin for "thus"
or "such".
Germans might disagree. Apparently, in German sic refers to a whale's vagina.
