03.04.07
The Essays: Sixteenth Post (Footnotes)
Many of the footnotes in this book are extremely odd. A lot of them are very useful - translations of Latin quotations or brief explanations of stories Bacon references (often myths or fables) - but there are also a lot of rather superfluous footnotes. There are notes for words like “witty” (speeches) that say simply “ingenious”. Now, why interrupt the flow of my reading to define a word like that that is clearly still part of common language? Other examples would be “fame” and “popular”, which both have the same type of one-word definition footnote. Other footnotes simply change the ending of a word, “commend” to “commended”, for example. What’s the point? Anyone who is going to bother picking up and actually reading Francis Bacon’s Essays is going to be able to deal with everyday words and the slightly unusual writing convention of educated Elizabethan writers! They aren’t that complicated! I’d rather they defined no words at all and I had to pick up a dictionary if I didn’t know something than this! Translating Latin, summarizing stories, and giving the dates of historical figures and events is plenty, thank you very much!