I recently stumbled across a weirdness in the culture of writing: People (editors mostly, but some authors) objecting to the use of italics to set off literal text in another language. To them, the practice is othering, which after sniffing around for a bit I found a number of definitions. The Cambridge Dictionary’s definition is this: “The act of treating someone as though they are not part of a group and are different in some way.” There are others. What the definitions have in common is that othering is about people, not words in a language. I would use the word “shunning,” which is specifically about people, to demonstrate their otherness.
There are a lot of different uses of italics: simple emphasis, a term’s first definition, literal thoughts of characters, formal names of books, plays, ships, and so on. With one exception (stay tuned) I rarely use words from other languages unless they are being absorbed into common English usage and are already chin-deep. With a lot of these, the italics could go either way: Do we italicize “bon mot”? How about “fin de siècle”? or “que sera, sera”? I lean toward italics; again, stay tuned.
People who have read Drumlin Circus or The Everything Machine (and if you haven’t, please do!) are aware of the Bitspace Institute, a cult on the drumlins world obsessed with returning to Earth. They other themselves by excluding women, wearing distinctive clothes, living in a ritual-rich, monastic sort of setting—and speaking classical Latin among themselves, especially in front of non-Institute people, to further demonstrate their otherness. Here’s a sample, from The Everything Machine:
With one foot set a few decimeters ahead of the other, McKinnon tipped
his head back slightly and shouted his command in the Tongue: “Ego Alvah
McKinnon, Consul! Regulam ordinis nostri violastis! Arma ponite, exite et
ante me flectite!” [I am Consul Alvah McKinnon! You have violated the Rule
of our order! Lay down your weapons, come forth, and kneel before me!]
(McKinnon is the senior consul of the Institute. When he speaks a command, Institute men are required to obey.) The use of Latin is a characteristic of the Institute, so across the novel are short exchanges in “The Tongue” as they call it. I put a translation within square brackets after each Latin section. It’s part of the atmosphere surrounding the Institute, and I want it to be noticed. So in a way, it’s another use of italics as emphasis.
In my YA novel Complete Sentences, Eric’s mother speaks some Polish here and there:
Charlene set down her kielbasa. “Mrs. Lund, How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Polish?”
“Dziękuję.”
Here, that dziękuję is Polish is obvious from context. This isn’t always the case:
It might be too late. Bialek poked at the lock’s keypad. Szczury! Someone had gotten to it first!
You might guess from context that it’s some kind of expletive, and it is. Here, “szczury” is Polish for “rats”. The singular form is szczur. Now, there’s a problem with some words, especially from Slavic languages: If you’ve never seen them before, they could look like typos or evidence of corruption in the underlying file. The word “tak” in Polish means “yes.” Used alone, some readers might think it’s a misspelling of “tack.”
Another issue is that the same word might exist in two languages and mean very different things. In Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) the word for sister is “ate.” “Taco” in Japanese means “octopus.” “Slut” is Swedish for “the end.” There are lists of more here and here. My position is that italicizing a word from another language will warn the reader not to jump to conclusions. What italicization means is “this is a word in another language.” There is no judgment whatsoever in that caution.
To the contrary. English is famous for absorbing words from other languages into itself, essentially “othering” those words away from their origins and dropping them heedlessly into the English stewpot. In a sense, italicizing a word from another language honors it as a part of a language and a worthy culture that should be respected, and not treated as just another word collection that we can pick and choose from to fatten up our English.
All that said, it’s really not something worth fighting over. From what I read earlier today, the AP Stylebook recently picked it up. No big deal; I learned on and remain a Chicago Manual of Style guy. I just wanted to point out that most arguments of this type can go both or many ways, and there are nuances that should not be conveniently ignored in the cause of self-aggrandizement. I’ll keep writing the way I’ve always written. Others may do what they want. English survived Finnegan’s Wake. It’ll survive the nuanced uses of italics, whatever those turn out to be as the years roll on.
