Peter,
typed enter too fast. In the old college catalogs I have been looking at, everyone took the same courses and the works to be studied in each course were listed in the catalog itself. Not much "academic freedom" there. Sylabbus as a term must have been introduced once the course content was left to the discretion of the professor/instructor/teacher/whatever.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Smagorinsky
To: Recipient list suppressed
Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2000 8:40 AM
Subject: today's fun fact
"syllabus": Syllabus began life as a printer's error in a 15th-century edition of Cicero's Epistles to the Atticans. In this work Cicero had written "indices . . . quos vos Graeci . . . sittubas appelatis," meaning "indexes, which were called sittubas by the Greeks." The printer misprinted "syllabos" for "sittubas" and syllabos, later slightly changed to syllabus (instead of sittubas), became a synonym for index. Its meaning of index or table of contents was later expended to mean "an outline or other brief statement of a discourse, the contents of a curriculum, etc."
Source: The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson
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