That I am able in the article on the left to quote so accurately from Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie owes everything to the fact that I possess a copy of the script. I bought it last week from Blackwell’s in Broad Street, noticing as I did so a ‘clanger’ concerned with another play, in a poster near the front door.
That’s it above, quoting Juliet’s famous question, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” and supplying his invented answer “I’m in the bookshop”.
In creating this (very limp) joke, the copy-writer has made the mistake — as people often do, until they are told better — of thinking that ‘wherefore’ means the same as ‘where’.
In fact, it means ‘why’. The question Juliet is asking, in effect, is “Why are you Romeo Montague?” — that is, a member of a family with whom she, a Capulet, must ever be on terms of enmity.
An error of this kind is hardly what you expect to find displayed in an academic bookseller of the status of Blackwell’s. I urge the sort of prompt remedial action that the company took five years ago when Gray Matter criticised the wording of a ‘buy one get one free’ offer — promoted in the windows and on thousands of stickers — which alluded to the ‘cheapest’ of two books. This should have read ‘cheaper’.
Final thought: since ‘wherefore’ means ‘why’, why is the familiar phrase ‘the why and the wherefore’ not generally considered tautologous?
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