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I've read a few of Daniel Defoe's novels, but I wouldn't really call myself a Defoe fan. Nevertheless, I do use viz. quite often.



Aramis does fancy stylishly archaic terms like 'viz.' An excerpt from an [unknown] original work relates:
Shocking as this may be, I will admit to once making a faulty assumption from not looking something up. In reading Defoe, I had always taken his viz. to mean vis-ŕ-vis. One day while looking something else up somewhere in the V’s, on a whim I looked for viz . To my surprise, Dafoe’s term turned out to be an abbreviation for videlicet, which means ‘that is to say’ or ‘namely’, [and thus very much like id est ]. My interpretation of "vis-ŕ-vis" was reasonably useful by one of its three definitions, but not what Dafoe wrote. So, even a literary snob can stumble on a forehead-smacking discovery.


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Thanks, A--I hadn't known that; or rather, had forgotten. My brain doesn't seem to want to retain Latin for some reason. Videlicet, videlicet...vee-day-lee-chet?

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Videlicet, with the c as an s. As far as Latinate abbreviations and terms go, I've always been partial to the old footnotary terms ibid. (for ibidem 'in the same place') and op. cit. (for opere citato 'in the cited work').


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Kafka-esque, solipsistic Aramis had not only botched the meaning of viz. but evidently was not pronouncing videlicet correctly either.
Cf. for compare and et al. seem quite useful and awkward to replace.


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I have to admit 'f' or 'ff' is shorter, but I do miss 'et seq'.


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I ran across videlicet's cousin t'other day: viz. scilicet 'namely, that is to say', abbreviated sc.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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sc. is used often in OED2 -- I mean *very often.

#159891 07/31/06 12:19 AM
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You miss et seq.? Golly, have some of mine: I use it so often that I have an autocorrect abbreviation for it which includes html formatting for the italics.

Et seq. is used in Michigan statutory citation form, to indicate citation to a series of statutes, typically comprising a single act. The governmental immunity act, for example, is cited as MCL 691.1401 et seq.

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