Amanuensis
My colleague came home from a meeting with a collaborator. “He included you in the proposal we’re putting together,” he said. “He wants you to be his amanuensis.”
While my first reaction was a moment of panic about scheduling, it was quickly replaced with a feeling of complete confusion: what the heck is an amanuensis?
It’s startlingly rare that I don’t know the basic definition of something. It’s even stranger when I walk to the bookcase and retrieve the dictionary. But it borders on completely surreal when I, middle school spelling bee champ, couldn’t even find the definition because I was spelling the word completely incorrectly (I had inaccurately assumed that it began with “e”).
For those of you keeping track at home, Dictionary.com defines it as “a person employed to take dictation or to copy manuscripts.” Hmmm. Scrolling down further to see the word origin, I’m presented with this: “Amanuensis comes from Latin, from the phrase (servus) a manu, “slave with handwriting duties,” from a, ab, “by” + manu, from manus, “hand.”
So there you have it. By using a big, fancy word to describe my role instead of simply saying, “I need a qualified writer,” I’m now technically defined as a transcription slave. He would have been better off asking me in plain English.
3 Responses to “Amanuensis”
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Friends of TDP
March 5th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
If you were in my sophomore English class, you’d have known this word. It’s on one of our vocabulary lists.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Maybe that’s my problem. I had a great English teacher for junior and senior years, less than stellar for sophomore year.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:22 am
I know amanuensis, because I read too many Victorian novels. But something very similar happened to me recently… I have poster of the painting “August” by Frolic Weymouth hanging in my cube. A coworker came in one day and said, “Why do you have that painting up? Do you know Frolic Weymouth?” I said no, I’d only met him once at a fundraiser and I put the poster up because it’s one of my favorites. She puffed herself all up and said “Well, my friend is Weymouth’s majordomo, you know.”
Majordomo? WTF is a majordomo? I asked her and got a long-winded description of what is basically a butler. Wow. Who knew they still existed? But time has stopped in Chadds Ford, so I suppose if they’re going to exist in America, they’ll be there.