Incipit

The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is its first few words. Before the development of titles such texts were often referred to by their incipits. The word, meaning "it begins", comes from the Latin description of a book: Incipit carmen Virgilis arma virumque cano means "Virgil's poem begins arma virumque cano".

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In the medieval period, incipits were often written in a different script or color from the rest of the work of which they were a part:

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:This book contains all the knowledge that is needed to make a cheesecake in the New York style with all of its possible variations, from the simple cherry based original to the bumbleberry variation.

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Though the name is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia, and can be found in various parts of the world. In the clay tablet archives-libraries of Sumer, catalogs of the documents were kept by making special catalog tablets containing the incipits of a given collection of tablets.

Related Topics:
Classical antiquity - Clay tablet - Archive - Sumer - Catalog

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The catalog was meant to be used by the very limited number of official scribes who had access to the archives, and the width of a clay tablet and its "resolution" did not permit long entries. This is a Sumerian example from Lerner:

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:Honored and noble warrior

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:Where are the sheep

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:Where are the wild oxen

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:And with you I did not

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:In our city

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:In former days

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The names of many books in the Hebrew Bible are incipits, while their Greek names are titles. For instance, Lamentations is called in Hebrew Eykhah, which is the first word, meaning "How", while in Greek it is called Threnoi, meaning "Lamentations". All the names of parshiot are incipits.

Related Topics:
Hebrew Bible - Lamentations - Parshiot

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Modern library catalogs make use of uniform naming or titling customs which developed over the centuries in the publishing world. The idea of choosing a few words or a phrase or two, which would be placed on the spine of a book and its cover, developed slowly with the birth of printing, and the idea of a title page with a short title and subtitle came centuries later, replacing the early verbose titles. The use of these standardized titles, combined with the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), have made the incipit obsolete as a tool for organizing information in libraries.

Related Topics:
Library - Publishing - Printing - International Standard Bibliographic Description

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While the term "incipit" is rarely heard today outside academic circles, incipits are still common for certain purposes. Untitled poems and songs are frequently referred to for convenience by their first lines; that such a use is an incipit and not a title is most obvious when the line breaks off in the middle of a grammatical unit (e.g. Shakespeare's sonnet 55 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments").

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Furthermore, a new and capacious niche for the incipit seems to have emerged in recent years. On personal computers used in offices and home environments, the "save" dialog box of certain word processors proposes the document's first few words as its default name. If the document has been headed by a title, of course, this will become the document name; but when authors dive straight into their texts without a title, and if when the time comes they do not rename such a document but simply accept the computer's suggestion, they are in a sense unwittingly saving the document under its incipit. This can be taken as a comment on the perennial usefulness of incipit, on the natural origins of incipit, or it can be a reflection of the lack of modernity of these computer systems. If an author makes a habit of accepting these names, a directory listing of his or her computer can produce a list just as cryptic as a Sumerian library catalogue.

Related Topics:
Personal computers - Office - Word processor - Directory

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