Urtext

By Deane Barker tags: definition
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Definition: the original text of something; esp. music

“ur-” is German for “original” or “primitive.”

The urtext is the original document, without any changes. It’s often used to discuss printed music, as these tend to change over time to accommodate new notation or musical styles.

Why I Looked It Up

From The Real Work, discussing the mythical S.W. Erdnase, a pen name adopted by the author of a seminal book on card tricks.

Erdnase is everywhere. […] He is the subtext, and sometimes the ur-text, of so much else.

Note that I didn’t find the hyphenation anywhere else when researching this.

Update

Added on

In Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, in a discussion of Nigerian 419 email scams:

[the details in the emails are] as evocative of remote and unknown sites of money and power as some invented Damascene castle of Galician dungeon must have been in the first centuries of the Spanish Prisoner con, which is the urtext of what is played out in this emails.

Links from this – The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery August 24, 2023
This book annoyed the hell out of me. This is another book that doesn’t really describe anything in any objective sense. Rather, it’s a…"meditation” on something. It comes off feeling indulgent and narcissistic. The writer jumps around. He talks about how he tried to master drawing, then he goes...
Links from this – Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet July 3, 2024
This is a long look at the history of spam, in all its forms. Spam has a long history, from email to Usenet to social media to everything in between. The book has a nice general definition of spam: an abuse of someone’s attention. So, if someone is paying attention to something else, and you take...