[WikiEN-l] Compendium

Let's take a little tour through the dictionary. I'm going to use AHD4 (running the risk of being trumped by people with access to the full OED) but, here goes. com·pen·di·um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com·pen·di·ums or com·pen·di·a (-d - ) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A list or collection of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening, from compendere, to weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh. In other words, the word compendium implies some kind of distillation or selection. en·cy·clo·pe·di·a A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically. ETYMOLOGY:Medieval Latin encyclopaedia, general education course, from alteration of Greek enkuklios paideia, general education : enkuklios, circular, general; see encyclical + paideia, education (from pais, paid-, child; see pau- in Appendix I). WORD HISTORY: The word encyclopedia, which to us usually means a large set of books, descends from a phrase that involved coming to grips with the contents of such books. The Greek phrase is enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, “cyclical, periodic, ordinary,” and paideia, “education,” and meaning “general education.” Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense “general course of instruction,” first recorded in 1531. In New Latin the word was chosen as the title of a reference work covering all knowledge. The first such use in English is recorded in 1644. In the case of what an encyclopedia is supposed to cover, things are less clear, but there is a strong implication that it has something to do with education or teaching or school. Encyclopedias don't cover everything, they cover "book-larning." They have some vague connection (not ironical here) with the idea of being a universal _textbook,_ covering those areas relevant to a _general education_. Now, compendium of human _knowledge:_ knowl·edge 1. The state or fact of knowing. 2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study. 3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. 4. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge. 5. Specific information about something. 6. Carnal knowledge. I think we can agree that "universal compendium of human knowledge" is not referring to meaning number #6. Inclusionists seem to feel that it ought to mean #3, "The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned." But I think there is often an understanding that knowledge, _in the context of an encyclopedia,_ has meaning number #4. In other words, book-larning. Naturally, we extend this quite a bit, for a number of reasons. Paper publishers are quite happy to publish an "encyclopedia of baseball" or an "encyclopedia of vaudeville" and Microsoft has published an "MS-DOS encyclopedia," and we include material of this kind in Wikipedia. However, business directories, gazetteers, Who's Who, and the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac are _never_ called the "encyclopedias of businesses," "encyclopedias of place names," "the Marquis Encyclopedia of Vanity Pages," or the "Encyclopedia of Ephemeral Astronomical Data Useful for Navigation." -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/