People who write in library books deserve to be stabbed with their pencils. On the other hand, while it makes reading the original much harder, a certain kind of annotation is guaranteed to add comic relief to the driest of academic prose.

And indeed, Dutch translations of tricky idiomatic phrases such as “a preliminary stab at” (“inleidende poging tot”) or words like “iconoclasm” (“schoppen tegen establishment”) might be quite useful, for an essay in a Dutch library. On the other hand it’s a Dutch philosophy department library, so I would hope that not everyone needs the final two paragraphs bracketed and “more and more general; conclusion” helpfully added in the margin.

The paper is Donald Davidson’s A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,1 on the problems that malapropisms pose for Davidson’s theory of language. On the eighth page I find the marginal note “Who is Mrs Malaprop?”, and indeed reading back it seems she’s introduced with “…I thought that the word ‘malaprop’, though the name of Sheridan’s character,…”. I hope my anonymous annotator figured it out in the end, since it adds a lot to the central notion of the essay.

(They seem to have been rather hasty with the pencil; in the following essay the phrase “ketches and yawls” is given underlining and a question-mark, although it’s immediately followed by a definition.)

I must confess that I’m still mystified by one addition though: the word “proposal” is heavily circled in the sentence “Here is a highly simplified and idealized proposal about what goes on.” My inner reading voice pronounces this as “Here is a highly simplified and idealized PROPOSAL about what goes on,” and my PROPOSAL for whoever is responsible is that they CEASE, immediately and forthwith, WRITING in LIBRARY BOOKS.

Notes:

  1. I got out of bed at sparrow-fart this morning for our reading group discussion, only to discover that it’s next week. [↪]