Even in ancient Mesopotamia, scribes spent their first year copying the letters and arguments of others as examples of good writing. Only then did they graduate to writing under their own names and devices. Lots of their practice tablets ended up baked for our amusement -- with complaints in the margins about the hard and unfair taskmasters...
You gotta love it... U back in North Bay David Ritchie wrote:
Surfacing briefly from my deep study of "Gertrude of Wyoming"--"O LOVE! in such a wilderness as this, Where transport and security entwine," I endeavored to answer an off-list question about the etymology of "sophomore." Here is my reply. I'm wondering if anyone on the list has nits to pick with or in it, or just stuff to add?The tale begins in Cambridge in 1688 where, someone explained, "The several degrees of persons in the University Colleges...Fresh Men, Sophy Moores, Junior Soph. or Sophester. And lastly Senior Soph." The terminology transferred to the U.S. during the colonial period. The root is "sophism," but the word back then did not mean what it does today, "an specious argument," a "clever but empty device." A sophism was a university exercise. A course in rhetoric, if I am remembering correctly, began with a year of copying how others had made arguments. Only in the second year would someone begin to make arguments of his own. I think therefore that a sophomore is someone who has passed to the stage of creating his own positions.Wikipedia has another story, but I don't find it convincing. My sources are the O.E.D. and a lecture I attended a long while ago on the history of universities.David Ritchie,Portland, Oregon
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