Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: At the beginning of the fourth paragraph of Trollope’s Phineas Finn, we are informed in some editions that ‘Phineas eat his terms for three years, and was duly called to the Bar’ and in others that ‘Phineas sat his terms …’. In a note to this passage, Sutherland1 says ‘Both make sense since dining in would be required of Phineas’. Both may indeed make sense, but only ‘eat’ is correct. As OED 1.2a explains it, with examples from Macaulay, Thackeray, Mayhew and Lever, to eat one’s terms: a colloquial phrase for ‘to be studying for the Bar’; students being required to have dined in the Hall of an Inn of Court three or more times during each of twelve terms before they can be ‘called’. There is no legitimate evidence for the reading ‘sat’. Rather it is the result of linguistic ignorance: the text has fallen into the hands of people who do not know that for Trollope the past tense of eat (phonetically /iːt/) is ‘eat’ (phonetically /ɛt/): Lord Chiltern ‘slept there, and probably eat his breakfast in some apartment of his own’ (ch. 11, Sutherland 139); ‘Phineas … won his match, and eat his luncheon’ (ch. 15, Sutherland 169). Sutherland’s willingness to consider ‘sat’ is the result, I believe, of deference to his Oxford predecessors, but it is misplaced. The exact process by which it entered the various versions of the Oxford University Press editions is difficult to trace. As late as 1949, we find ‘Phineas eat his terms’, but the editions of 1951, 1973, and 1982 read ‘Phineas sat his terms’. The 1951 edition was reset entirely; but the 1973 and 1982 prints are otherwise substantially identical, page for page, line for line, word for word, to the 1949. In neither case is there evidence sign that the change was made by a qualified person; but whoever it was has left us a simple way of discovering which subsequent editors and publishers have actually done the work and which have simply appropriated an Oxford edition.
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Ross G Arthur
Institution: York University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,296
OpenAlex ID: W4409383440