Geoff Pullum gnaws at an Edmund Morgan quote from Gore Vidal discussing Lincoln, trying to puzzle out the meaning of an interpolated sic; he finds several possible layers in this quote, and by reproducing it here I’m adding another:
With his centralizing of all power at Washington this “reborn” (sic) union was ready for a world empire that has done us as little good as it has done the world we have made so many messes in.
Geoff may have dashed off his entry a tad hastily, by the way; the sentence “Or was it in the original by Vidal, a sign put there by Vidal to say that Washington really did use the word ‘reborn’?” indicates he’s mistaken Vidal’s reference to the country’s capital for one to its Father.
Or scrambled the twinned-for-convenience-sake “Presidents” who gave their stature to a generic excuse to down tools and sleep in. Rather than city for man, man for man.
See here:
http://informant38.blogspot.com/2002_10_06_informant38_archive.html#82593382
or click on ‘ahem’.
Great picture! Here‘s the direct link.
The reference is to Lincoln, not Washington. I assume that Vidal is questioning Lincoln’s use of the word “reborn” in some speech or other. Usually [sic] is used for a grammatical, factual, or spelling error, not simply an opinion that one doesn’t share. Its usefulness is in indicating who made a particular error, but its secondary use is to point out someone else’s error in a snide way.
In 2003 it would have taken some work to find out whose (sic) that was, but now it’s trivial: it was Gore Vidal’s. The sentence was copied faithfully by the book reviewer, who didn’t notice that sic within a quote would be ambiguous. This is an easy mistake to make, you’ve done it yourself occasionally (example). I expect that’s why you eventually started signing your own editorial insertions with “–LH”.
As for what Vidal meant, it’s a sneer, indicating “Can you believe he said *that*? What bullshit!” (Kids today might write “this rEboRN uNIoN”.) Wikipedia (following Garner) calls this “ironic use of sic”; Fowler (1926) did a much better job than Garner of explaining this use, and he doesn’t approve:
I’m with Fowler on that. Merriam-Webster’s discussion provides a similar example:
Vidal’s (sic) is even more confusing since his “reborn” is not a literal quote, but a gesture toward Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom”. I would’ve preferred something like “purportedly” or “(ha!)” instead.
“Reborn” also has another sense, in that before 1861, the United States had generally been written in the plural, with the states regarded as sovereign entities that legally ceded powers to the federal government, in a similar manner to today’s EU members, whereas after the Civil War, the term “United States” was regarded as a grammatically indivisible singular phrase, with the members subordinate parts of an indivisible whole.
It’s not that clear-cut, but the general trend was more or less like that, according to a LLog post I read long ago.
Hashed out here in 2009.
It’s only fair to note that Language Log corrected the Washington/Lincoln mistake in response to this post; the oldest Wayback Machine captures even have a small-print note “Thanx to Language Hat for noticing it”, though that note eventually disappeared.
Ah.