I was reading the section on Pasternak’s 1922 Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers] in the magnificent Reference Guide to Russian Literature
While there is little plot, the prosaic details encountered on this everyday journey stimulate the girl’s imagination into an endless process of recreating reality. The only logical chain linking the digressions, omissis and unrelated switches from which the story is woven lies in Zhenia’s life experience.
Now, I’m a widely read fellow, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered the word omissis before except in Latin (where it is the dative/ablative plural of omissus ‘neglected, omitted,’ a passive participle of omittō). Wiktionary tells me it is also an Italian word (masculine, invariable) meaning “omission (deliberate),” though it is not in any Italian dictionary I have access to, so I presume it is rare; Dizy gives the following sample sentences:
Nell’ordinanza di rinvio a giudizio, gli omissis erano così numerosi da renderne incomprensibili i motivi.
I partecipanti alla riunione hanno chiesto, per alcuni documenti, una versione in cui figurassero meno omissis.
Rileggendo gli atti, i suoi “omissis” ad alcune domande mi hanno molto contrariato.
What I can say with some confidence is that it is not an English word (and I say that as someone who is notoriously lax about welcoming marginal items into the word-hoard); it is not in the OED (except in a Latin title: A. Boate, Observationes medicæ, de affectibus omissis, 1649) or any other dictionary I have access to, and Google Books gives only Latin hits, apart from a passage in David Ward’s Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism:
And in relating what he had occasion to read in the secret files, and in order to further cloud the air of mystery, Genna makes ample use of the term OMISSIS, always in upper case, to indicate when information has been deemed too sensitive for the general public’s eyes and ears and is excised from a document.
The section was written by Daša Šilhánková Di Simplicio, who has written books in Italian and thus is presumably more at home in it than in English (though her first two names are Czech and/or Slovak, Šilhánková being the feminine form of Šilhánek), so I assume she used “omissis” as a term familiar from that language, perhaps not being sure what the English equivalent was (though you’d think “omissions” would do well enough — I note that while the Italian word is both singular and plural, here it is clearly plural in context, which might lead the innocent reader to suspect a singular “omissi”). I don’t blame her for its appearance in the final text, I blame the editorial staff at Fitzroy Dearborn, who should be able to differentiate between obscure but defensible scholarly terms and straight-up foreign words that will simply bewilder the hapless reader. (Of course, it may be that I am wrong and it is in fact used by some English-speaking scholarly community, in which case I welcome correction, as always.)
Is this word omissis, in the meaning “omissions”, from the ablative absolute omissis omittendis (“the things to be omitted having [duly] been omitted”), a notice to the reader that redactions have been made in reproducing the text of a document? If we can judge from a Google Books search on this expression, it seems to have been used quite often in the publication of diplomatic correspondence from a certain era.
It screams Italian to me, especially the uninflected plural – but then, so does the “everyday journey.”
The Italian word may be rare — I suppose “omission” and “redaction” aren’t very common words in English either — but I doubt it’s particularly obscure. It has an entry in all the online dictionaries I can quickly think of:
Garzanti,
Hoepli, Sabatini Coletti, Treccani, even Cambridge for a bilingual one.
All dictionaries that specify the full ablative absolute suggest ceteris omissis rather than omissis omittendis, but aside from this Xerîb is undoubtedly right. The transparent etymology is that “(omissis)” is used to mark omissions and redactions in official documents, especially court documents. It’s easy to find online copies of Italian court rulings full of (omissis) marks. So Italians have come to say “omissis” as shorthand for “omissions and redactions.”
By the way, a little web snooping points to the author of the passage as Dagmar Silhankova, whose CV attests that she grew up and went to college in Bratislava, but moved to Florence in the mid seventies and seems to have remained in Tuscany ever since, teaching English and Russian language and literature to Italians. I’d imagine she rather counts as an imperceptibly non-native speaker of Italian than as someone simply at home in the language.
As a fellow Italian speaker, I have tremendous sympathy for her all-too-easy slip of inadvertently assuming that Latin and Latinate expressions must be the same in every language. However, I also agree with our gracious host that omissis is in fact an Italian word only, and proofreading ought to have caught it.
[Reposting a comment that disappeared, probably because I linked directly to five online dictionaries]
The Italian word may be rare — I suppose “omission” and “redaction” aren’t very common words in English either — but I doubt it’s particularly obscure. It has an entry in all the online dictionaries I can quickly think of: Garzanti, Hoepli, Sabatini Coletti, Treccani, even Cambridge for a bilingual one.
All dictionaries that specify the full ablative absolute suggest ceteris omissis rather than omissis omittendis, but aside from this Xerîb is undoubtedly right. The transparent etymology is that “(omissis)” is used to mark omissions and redactions in official documents, especially court documents. It’s easy to find online copies of Italian court rulings full of (omissis) marks. So Italians have come to say “omissis” as shorthand for “omissions and redactions.”
By the way, a little web snooping points to the author of the passage as Dagmar Silhankova, whose CV attests that she grew up and went to college in Bratislava, but moved to Florence in the mid seventies and seems to have remained in Tuscany ever since, teaching English and Russian language and literature to Italians. I’d imagine she rather counts as an imperceptibly non-native speaker of Italian than as someone simply at home in the language.
As a fellow Italian speaker, I have tremendous sympathy for her all-too-easy slip of inadvertently assuming that Latin and Latinate expressions must be the same in every language. However, I also agree with our gracious host that omissis is in fact an Italian word only, and proofreading ought to have caught it.
Omissis vs. lacunae:
“And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean for things they didn’t know,
But that time seems to be passing.”
Ezra pound, Canto XIII
Sensu stricto/lato is widespread, but in French stricto/lato sensu is the preferred word order.
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean for things they didn’t know
Had they ever, I’m wondering? They seemed to more often either come up with stuff to fill the blanks, or just not write those parts at all.
(But actually yes, or at least kind of yes – the early parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have quite lengthy sections with nothing but a listing of year numbers.
As was said on a similar subject more recently in a different part of the world: В ету статтю надоть чо-нить дописать, ешшо тут маловато написано дык.)
[“Something should be added to this article, there’s too little written here yet” – the standard concluding template of mostly-empty year articles in the Siberian Wikipedia.]
Дык!
when the historians left blanks in their writings
The scribes of the Annals of the Four Masters, a 1630s synthesis of medieval Irish chronicles, left space at the end of each year’s entries for additions from any chronicles which might be received or reviewed later in the editing process. Sometimes not enough space, e.g. RIA MS 23 P 6 f. 165 v has to write small to squeeze in all of 1427’s events.
O Mrs., what did you leave out?
Took me a minute to get that, but I chuckled.
One English equivalent might be “redactions” in the new (?), annoying bureaucracy-derived meaning.
The OED dates it to 1958, but has no corresponding sense for redactor, a word I first read in connection with the four-document theory of the Pentateuch: the “JE redactor”, “JED redactor”, and “JEDP” (“jed-pee”) redactor.
Sensu stricto
Both Wikt and WordReference Forums think this is confined to biologists, not only in taxonomical Latin but in sentences like “Protein X binds to filament Z senso strictu” (meaning ‘independent of whatever complex Z might be part of). Wikt lists stricto sensu for English, French, and Portuguese, and provides o mais stricto sensu ‘in the narrowest sense’ for the last, which I think is delightful, since it treat the the phrase as an ordinary Portuguese adverb.
< Redakteur “newspaper editor” < rédacteur “id.”
I didn’t even know that sense.
Oh yes!
The 1958 OED cite for the “censor” meaning of redact makes it sound as thought it was commonplace legal terminology, so it must be somewhat older than that date.
Rodger C:
I was just reading some old discussions on Language Log about the newness of this sense. On December 21, 2004, Mark Liberman wrote:
He checked and didn’t find it in AHD (2000), Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, or the OED (1989). But he forgot to check Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, which had just recently added that sense in its 2003 edition: “to obscure or remove (text) from a document prior to publication or release”.
Arnold Zwicky then took the question to ADS-L and reported back with examples from a legal decision in 1957, and a couple of news stories from 1978 quoting government sources about “redacted” documents, which the reporters at the time thought needed to be defined for the public as “censored” (one of those stories is now quoted in the OED).
Other general dictionaries caught up within the next few years: the OED’s revision was in 2009 (with a comment “Now the most common sense”), and AHD added this sense in its 2011 edition.
That sense of redacted/redaction has been current among NYC lawyers (and probably American lawyers more generally) for my entire career (now more than three decades), and I have no reason to believe it had arisen only moments before I entered private practice circa ’93. That said, I have no view as to when well-established niche-occupational jargon should be picked up by a general-interest dictionary. Our old hard-copy professional-jargon dictionaries have by now been supplanted by online sources, so I have no idea how old this definition is: https://thelawdictionary.org/redaction/
That sense of redacted/redaction has been current among NYC lawyers (and probably American lawyers more generally) …
The Nixon tape transcriptions 1974 used [Expletive deleted]. Would ‘[Redacted]’ have been available in that sense back then? History might have shone a different light on tricky Dicky.
The specific phrasing, “EXPLETIVE DELETED,” may have been the invention of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary for almost the entirety of his political career—best known for erasing the tape of Nixon’s most incriminating meeting with Haldeman during the Watergate coverup. (I have previously opined that the most interesting question about the erasure—apart from what the pair actually talked about—is whether Nixon or Haldeman ordered Woods to erase the tape, or whether she, after hearing what was on it, decided to erase it on her own.)
In the specific sense under discussion, a redacted version of a document presupposes a prior unredacted version. But in the Nixon-transcript context there may never have been an earlier physically-existing typed transcript that faithfully transcribed the expletives in question. A modified version of the original recording in which the expletives were “bleeped out” or otherwise rendered inaudible (common these days for certain sorts of recorded music) would be analogous to a redacted version but I’m not sure if you’d literally call it that.
If it’s supposed to be Latin (as opposed to Italian) omissis by itself is mere sham Latin. Cargo-cult Latin. Assuming it’s meant to be part of an ablative absolute construction, it makes no sense at all without an omittendis or ceteris to tell you just what has been omitted. Dangling participles, nothing.
And if it’s not supposed to be brutally ripped out of an ablative absolute, why is it dative/ablative at all?
I suppose that the Young People of Today do talk about “hapaxes” when they mean ἅπαξ λεγόμενα. Probably too much texting. I don’t know what the world is coming to. Eheu fugaces …
“when well-established niche-occupational jargon should be picked up by a general-interest dictionary”: When it’s routinely used without explanation in non-specialist media, I’d say is a good criterion. That must have been sometime after 1985, since William Safire wrote a column that year about hearing it for the first time. An assistant attorney general told him “We’ve been redacting thousands of pages of documents for a month”, he asked what that meant, and was told “It means to purge it of 6-e stuff”, 6-e being a section of law on what must be kept secret in grand-jury proceedings. Safire approved:
(He’s wrong about “the Latin word for ‘reduce’ ”; the collection Language Maven Strikes Again includes a reader’s letter correcting him.) He was always a cheerleader for precision, but “cool, new euphemism!” seems odd coming from him — isn’t that the kind of thing he would wag a finger at others for?
DE: not texting. Harry Potter.
Impelliarmus!
(Hey, I disliked the Harry Potter books before it was cool!)
I’m told that Voldemort created seven evil hapaxes …