the.com/biography
a life ransacked for meaning by someone who wasn't there.
means A written account of someone's life, composed by another person.
from Straight from Greek: bios, 'life,' joined to graphia, 'writing' — a cousin of the graph in photograph and telegraph. The two were welded together as biographia, the writing-down of a life, and the word arrived in English in the 17th century, with the people-who-write-them, biographers, following close behind.
- word roots
- Greek for life-writing, coined in the 1660s.
- sales truth
- dead subjects outsell living ones, no lawsuits.
- authorized versions
- often the most flattering and least honest.
- plutarch
- paired Greeks and Romans to compare their souls.
- hidden bias
- every life shaped by what the writer omits.