Tuesday, July 20, 2010

BLUNDER BOARD -- Message 1

From sunny California comes the following e-mail:

Great job, guys! For years I've been telling people that Anthony Cekada is no scholar. You have proved the emperor has no clothes. I know there wasn't enough room to record all his errors. Add this one to your list of bad editing:

On page 292 he spells the prayer to send down the Holy Ghost as epiklesis, but on page 328 it's spelled epiclesis.

The Reader replies: The editorial inconsistency of WHH is particularly annoying. If there is a choice of spelling, good academic press practice demands that an editor adopt one of the forms and stick to it. But, of course, mom-and-pop publishers can't provide such services, and individuals who do have such training stand far outside Fr. Cekada's cult.

The Reader has seen both spellings (e.g., in The Shorter O.E.D., Webster's Third New International Dictionary, O'Brien's Encyclopedia of Catholicism, and the B.A.C. edition of Righetti, the spelling with c is preferred); however, the spelling with k, a more faithful transcription of the Greek, is common in the professional literature cited in WHH (cf. the index entries in Fortescue, Dix, and Jungmann).

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