Bad Counsel
From a Slate.com article about the upcoming ABC television season:
Six Feet Under's Peter Krause plays the consigliore to a clan of horny plutocrats.
"Consigliore"? Oh, I don't think so.
The correct Italian word is "consigliere", which is akin to English "counsellor" and even sounds kind of like it, which is no surprise, because the words are from the same source, which we'll get to in a minute.
It seems we can blame Mario Puzo's careless proofreaders for the proliferation of the misspelling "consigliore", which gets over 31,000 Google hits. According to the Wikipedia page for "consigliere" (yes, the word has its own page),
In the first printing of The Godfather the spelling was "consigliori", changed in later print runs to "consiglieri".
("Consiglieri" is the plural of "consigliere".)
"Consigliere" and "counsellor" both descend from Latin "con-", "with", plus "clamare", "to call out". ("Clamare" also gave us, rather self-evidently, "clamour"--which Americans spell "clamor"--and "claim" plus its relatives "reclaim", "exclaim", and "acclaim".) In case you were wondering, "counsel" and "council" (and therefore obviously "counsellor" and "councillor") have the same derivation: their spellings went in different directions as their meanings diverged. Also extracted from this same set of roots are "conciliate", "consult", and "consul".
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have a listing for either the correct or the incorrect spelling of "consigliere", which isn't surprising, because England doesn't have the history of Italian immigration that introduced the word into North American English. Online dictionaries list the correct (but not the incorrect) spelling and the Macintosh spellchecker red-flags the incorrect spelling but knows the correct one, which leaves us with only one question: How did Slate screw it up? Do they not even spell-check over there?
I'll concede, for lack of other information, that the Microsoft spellchecker might include the misspelling. I don't have access to a newer version of Microsoft Word than Word 97, whose spellchecker doesn't even include "consigliere", but perhaps in the last ten years someone added both it and "consigliore" to the list. Could have happened. But it seems to me that a reasonably well-read person would know the difference. I mean, I did.
Six Feet Under's Peter Krause plays the consigliore to a clan of horny plutocrats.
"Consigliore"? Oh, I don't think so.
The correct Italian word is "consigliere", which is akin to English "counsellor" and even sounds kind of like it, which is no surprise, because the words are from the same source, which we'll get to in a minute.
It seems we can blame Mario Puzo's careless proofreaders for the proliferation of the misspelling "consigliore", which gets over 31,000 Google hits. According to the Wikipedia page for "consigliere" (yes, the word has its own page),
In the first printing of The Godfather the spelling was "consigliori", changed in later print runs to "consiglieri".
("Consiglieri" is the plural of "consigliere".)
"Consigliere" and "counsellor" both descend from Latin "con-", "with", plus "clamare", "to call out". ("Clamare" also gave us, rather self-evidently, "clamour"--which Americans spell "clamor"--and "claim" plus its relatives "reclaim", "exclaim", and "acclaim".) In case you were wondering, "counsel" and "council" (and therefore obviously "counsellor" and "councillor") have the same derivation: their spellings went in different directions as their meanings diverged. Also extracted from this same set of roots are "conciliate", "consult", and "consul".
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have a listing for either the correct or the incorrect spelling of "consigliere", which isn't surprising, because England doesn't have the history of Italian immigration that introduced the word into North American English. Online dictionaries list the correct (but not the incorrect) spelling and the Macintosh spellchecker red-flags the incorrect spelling but knows the correct one, which leaves us with only one question: How did Slate screw it up? Do they not even spell-check over there?
I'll concede, for lack of other information, that the Microsoft spellchecker might include the misspelling. I don't have access to a newer version of Microsoft Word than Word 97, whose spellchecker doesn't even include "consigliere", but perhaps in the last ten years someone added both it and "consigliore" to the list. Could have happened. But it seems to me that a reasonably well-read person would know the difference. I mean, I did.
posted by pyramus | 6:53 AM
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