Katherine Eggert's email reminds me of a pun that I committed years ago
when I began annotating Spenser's Faerie Queene, on the temptation of an
annotator to set himself up between the reader and the text, forcing the
reader to see through a gloss darkly. Years later in writing on the
philosophy of the footnote, I checked the dictionary to learn that 'glossa'
became conflated with 'gloze' whose root, meaning 'to gleam' came to
suggest deceptive appearance (gloss sb.2.1b).
Bert Hamilton
At 10:19 PM 2001-10-31 -0700, you wrote:
>"Glozing" carries the sense of flattery (and hence of perversion of
>truth),
>right? So there might be an inherent connection between
>glow-worms/glose-worms and the "changeable counsellors" not just in
>terms of
>their changeability, but in terms of their ability to "gloze."
>
>I would be interested to learn if early modern writers suspect that
>glosses
>are themselves a form of glozing.
>
>
>Katherine Eggert
>Associate Professor of English
>Director of Graduate Studies
>University of Colorado, Boulder
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>
>
A.C.Hamilton
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Cappon Professor Emeritus
Queen's University, Canada
Phone & Fax: 613- 544-6759
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