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This principle has some wider everyday application. If one wants to determine the correct spelling of a name, and finds conflicting versions, it is often the more "difficult" one that is correct, not the one that is most widely used. For example, a British politician was correctly named Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, Baron Carrington - the family name has only one "r", the peerage title two. However, a Google search, which can often be useful to determine such matters, might find: "Peter Alexander Rupert Carington" - 32 hits "Peter Alexander Rupert Carrington" - 79 hits Choosing the "more common" spelling would thus be wrong in this case. However, even without definite knowledge of what the correct spelling is, Carington is to be preferred because it is clearly the more unusual. If Carrington were correct, there would hardly be such a high incidence of the particular misspelling Carington. But the reverse is not surprising, since people might easily consider the unusual name Carington a mistake and falsely "correct" it. On the other hand, taken as an axiom, the principle ''lectio difficilior'' produces an eclectic text rather than one based on a history of manuscript transmission. "Modern eclectic praxis operates on a variant unit basis without any apparent consideration of the consequences," Maurice Robinson has warned, suggesting that to the principle ''The reading which would be more difficult as a scribal creation is to be preferred'' should be added a corollary, ''difficult readings created by individual scribes do not tend to perpetuate in any significant degree within transmissional history''. (Robinson 2001). REFERENCES |
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