Apostille

There are many words that I have seen in print but do not know the meaning of, because I’ve been too lazy to look them up.  Three of these words, from an online vocabulary quiz sent to me by our son Andrew, are “fuliginous” (“sooty”), “cenacle” (“a group of people”), and “williwaw” (“a sudden violent squall”).  You could take the quiz too.

Words entirely unknown to me, words that I know I have never seen before, are rarer. One of them is “apostille,” which I became acquainted with when another of our offspring was married in the United States and found that she needed to take back with her to Germany, attached to her new marriage certificate, an apostille—that is, a document added to an official record, certifying its authenticity and guaranteeing its acceptance in other jurisdictions and countries.  Luckily a local office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts knew what an apostille was, had her fill out a form, took a few dollars from her, and sent her on her way with the right piece of paper.

Curiously, the OED defines “apostille” (in the form postil) only as a marginal note or comment.  It traces the word to French, then to the Latin word postilla, and from there (“probably,” says the OED, being cautious) to the Latin phrase post illa verba textus, “after these words the text.”  This is a set phrase which follows an inserted commentary, alerting the reader that the commentary is finishing and the original text beginning again.  I regret that the OED misses the technical, international-relations meaning of the word, because it is a yet another example of the way the vocabulary of diplomacy has stayed so stubbornly and interestingly French.  Think of the terms which we see in newspaper articles or which Foreign Service officers use in their work every day: envoy, chargé d’affaires, démarche, attaché, aide-mémoire, communiqué, concordat, bloc, entente, impasse, liaison.  All are French, all a relic of the age when French was the language of international communication par excellence. The Corps Diplomatique (source of the letters “CD” found on diplomats’ license plates, and the reason they can ignore parking tickets) could scarcely function, even today, without a French vocabulary. If this seems fanciful, take a look at your US passport.  Some of it is in French: Le Secrétaire d’Etat des Etats-Unis d’Amérique prie par les présentes toutes autorités compétentes de laisser passer . . . Recent passports give the same message in Spanish, a sign of changing demographics at home and of a changing world situation. When will the passport message also be given in Chinese, I wonder?