the.com/footnote
The whisper at the bottom of the page where authors hide their best jokes.
means A note placed at the bottom of a page that adds a citation, comment, or clarification to something in the main text.
from A plain compound of "foot," meaning the bottom or lower end of a thing (as in the foot of a hill or a page), and "note." English has long used "foot" for the base of an object, and once printers began parking explanatory notes at the bottom of the page rather than the margins, "footnote" was the natural name — first for the page's foot, later stretched to mean any minor or secondary detail ("a mere footnote in history").
- origin
- Exploded in popularity once printing made precise pages possible
- david wallace
- Infinite Jest has 388 endnotes, some pages long
- legal weapon
- Footnote 4 of a 1938 case reshaped US law
- symbol
- The dagger sign came from marking the dead
- academic dread
- Often where scholars quietly bury inconvenient truths
wikipedia citation needed tags — unsourced claims marked with [citation needed] footnotes throughout the encyclopedia
chicago manual of style — established footnote/endnote standards in 1906, now the academic publishing standard in humanities