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Any
college/university student who has written a half-decent
higher education paper has undoubtedly used the term 'et
al' at the end of a reference to an article that was
written by multiple authors. The problem is, no one
knows who 'al' is.
You
see, many words frequently used in academia that are
abbreviated are borrowed from other languages such as
Latin (as a side note, why is abbreviation such a long
word?!). For example, the term 'i.e.' is abbreviated
from Latin, and it really stands for 'id est' which
means 'that is'.
In
the case of 'et al', it appears to be adapted from
French. The French word 'et' means 'and' and the word
'al', is well, 'Al'! So the question becomes, who IS Al?
Is al short for Albert? Is he from France? Albert seems
to be a common enough French name.
The
word 'al' must mean 'Al' since the alternatives just
don't make sense! Think about it... there couldn't
possibly be THAT many 'Al's in library search databases!
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It
is difficult to say what Al looks like today. He
must be a very old man. I mean, after all, his
name has been used for such a long time that he
must have aged quite a bit since his name was
first being used ad nauseam.
Make
no mistake, Al may be anonymous but he IS a
genius. Who else could have masterminded a plan
to co-author so many research papers as shown
through his being credited on thousands of
articles. |
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Possible
early picture of Al. |
One
theory is that Al isn't even a guy! Some say that 'al'
is short for Alison. This perspective is doubtful though
because the term 'et al' has been used for such a long
time that it dates back to a period when males dominated
the academic scene. Although, even if political
correctness was not a big thing over 30 years ago, the
use of 'al' as being sort of ambiguous is impressive.
Then again, people use 'Al' to refer to 'Alberts' more
than 'Alisons'. Confused? If you're worthy of reading
this article then you shouldn't be!
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Perhaps
Al is some kind of eternally undying researcher
who we innately feel we must pay homage to. The
famous psychologist Carl Jung came up with the
idea of the collective unconscious. He believed
that the collective unconscious contains the
entire spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution
and that it is innately developed in every
individual's brain. Maybe he was right! Perhaps
the idea of Al as the eternal researcher somehow
burst through and came into conscious for
someone in the field of writing guidelines and
everyone on the board naturally agreed that Al
had to be credited from then on. |
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What
Al might look like today. |
It
seems an impossible task to try to figure out how he
gets around so much. Maybe he has twin brothers.
Triplets? Clones? Sons? There are unlimited
possibilities!
Too
bad he wasn't a musician. If that were the case, the VH1
Behind The Music people would surely have tracked him
down and/or gathered his story from others. We may never
know who Al is or how he was placed in a position to
become so well-known, but we can certainly continue to
honor this elusive individual. |
