--- title: "Errata for Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History" layout: post image: feature: header_error.png --- It's always frustrating to find errors in a work that has already gone to press/been through peer review, but unfortunately my friend Pete Christian has unearthed a few minor mistakes that I want to put out here. Thanks to Pete, who also says that none of this detail affects the overall argument of the text. On p. 154, I’ve made a mistake when quoting Hollander – he says (correctly) that “home” is a Germanic word. I have it as having roots in German, which it doesn’t. That then makes my following list of words look muddled, because only the first of the words cited is actually German (the others are presumably Old English and Dutch). Admittedly Hollander is guilty of poor presentation here – he shouldn’t be quoting words from a variety of languages without saying which languages they’re from — if he’d done that, I’d have spotted the error. Incidentally, since “Heim” is a noun, it should have a capital. “\*kei” needs an asterisk (as in Hollander) because, like all IE roots, it’s a reconstruction. If we’re going to be really pedantic, the initial consonant is ḱ, not k (IE distinguishes the two). Pete notes that I am more definite than Hollander about the \*ḱei~home link, but that I am "not ... alone in that". On p. 155, I gloss “heimlich” as “homely”, but the German word for “homely” is “gemütlich”. In Modern German “heimlich” only means “secret, hidden”. It’s true that, to go by Grimm, the word used to have a broader range of meanings (e.g. “local”, “tame” and a closer link to “unheimlich”), but no longer, and the link to “canny” is unclear. I say: blame my citation of Stephen Connor. Anyway, publication day is tomorrow and the OA version will also be available then (once I am back from hospital in the morning).