[Sca-cooks] I'm back! (Be afraid? :-/ )

[Alex Clark]

At 09:58 PM 9/7/2003 -0400, Doc wrote:
>Language is not constant, but is continuously evolving.

The people who use the language do not need to be at the mercy of 
"evolution," to let their language evolve passively. As a current user of 
the language, I am one of the people in charge of that evolution, and I 
will not cooperate with this potential evolution of the language.

>Webster's online dictionary defines redact as "to put in writing" or "to 
>select or adapt for publication."  Both of these definitions are rather 
>broader than the one you gave, and both could be applied to the activities 
>of the cooks on the list.

Both of these are not just broad, they're vague. If people used "redact" 
according to the broader interpretations of these definitions, the likely 
result would be confusion. Besides, these vague definitions do not suggest 
that "redact" fits the usage in question as well as "interpret" does.

>In the SCA cooking community, the word "redact" and all of its variants 
>has a very specific meaning . . .

That's what I'm talking about. Since I do not accept the in-group jargon, 
you seem to define the "community" exclusively of me. That's one of the 
main uses for buzzword-type jargon. That's why I dislike it.

>Interpreting a recipe allows for a wider range of variation.  For example, 
>the person doing the interpretation might be trying to create a dish which 
>is pleasing to a wide audience, and may take substantial liberties with 
>the source recipe in the process. . . .

That's certainly an adaptation, but is it an interpretation? Not 
necessarily. To interpret is to explain, to clarify, to fill in missing or 
unspecified information, etc., in any case working from a source that is to 
be interpreted. When one *replaces* the source information with something 
else, one is not exactly interpreting it. It is true that some modern 
interpretations of period recipes are more historically informed than 
others, and that adaptations (and even recipes of more strictly modern 
provenance) have sometimes been presented as if they were interpretations 
or even redactions. But that should not broaden the proper usages of the 
words until everyone agrees to it, because such broadening of usage enables 
people to make (by a word that has a different meaning to some) meritless 
claims for their work. That may be why we love "redaction" so much: it 
sounds authoritative. It's more impressive than "interpretation."

Then again, one advantage of "interpret" is that its generally-accepted 
meaning is broader than that of "redact"--the word describes both strict 
and broad interpretations. Its use would imply, accurately, that in 
practice there is a wide range of standards for historical recipe 
interpretation, even that which has been called redaction. Besides, if it's 
all right to use "redaction" in a way that is at odds with its more 
long-established meaning(s), then it must be all right for me to use 
"interpretation" in a way that doesn't perfectly match your own 
understanding of the word.

BTW, I have a recipe for mincemeat that is derived from several different 
historical sources. I consider it to be a redaction because it's all based 
on pre-existing sources, although the content has been selectively 
recombined and reformatted. At this moment, I no longer remember which 
recipes I redacted, just that there were a lot of them.

Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon