Commonplace books

Strange name when you think about it, as Katie Herman at The Rare Commons provokes you to do. “Commonplace books are personal notebooks full of interesting snippets and quotations from other authors, thinkers and poets, known as ‘commonplaces’, that are all held in a common place (the book itself.)” Not sure I go along with the etymology she proposes though.

As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us commonplace is named “after classical Latin locus communis, itself after Hellenistic Greek κοινὸς τόπος (in ancient Greek simply τόπος (Aristotle: see topic adj.)), explained by Cicero ( Inv. 2. 14. 47 et seq.) as a general theme or argument applicable to many particular cases. Later, collections of such general topics were called loci communes (frequently from the early 16th cent. in book titles).” The meaning of words travels of course. Getting from Cicero to “something everyone knows” is an understandable first…