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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