Nine-W and Footnotes

The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White had a footnote illustrating questions the intellectual group around President Kennedy would ask each other. They would provide answers and ask what the questions were similar to today’s Jeopardy TV show. In this instance, the answer was Nine-W, and the footnote had the question, “Do you spell your name with a V, Mr. Vagner?”¹

This past weekend, I was in the Synagogue and looked at some footnotes in the prayer book, and it got me thinking about the commentary, information, updates and resources provided in footnotes.

I read footnotes. If the footnote has a source of an issue I am concerned about, I usually check it out when I finish the book. If it is about something that I do not think is correct or is an Aha item, I would read the footnote then and usually check it out later since I don’t want to lose the train of my reading. However, if I am researching something, I immediately go to the footnote and then go to where it takes me.

Some footnotes have a lot of added information that is not included in the text. Either it is not timely for the text or provides a more thorough rendition of the points written about without interrupting the flow of the text. I’ve seen footnotes that have run a couple of pages, and when I read them, it is at my choosing. Many times, I will read the footnotes consecutively after I finish reading the book. I also developed a code I use to take notes and keep these with the book, or if I take the book out of the library, I keep them in a folder with notes from similar books I’ve read. If I photocopy a page, I always make sure to copy the page with the footnote references. This method works well for me.

I would never quote from passages in a book without researching the footnotes completely. Some authors include in footnotes references to other footnotes in books they are quoting from. Some footnotes are written in an abbreviated style to relieve the author of writing further about a peripheral area, while other authors want to cover everything they are writing about and use the footnotes to do this.

A footnote is usually put at the bottom of the page it appears on, while some authors include it at the end of the chapter or end of the book, in which case they are called end notes or simply notes. Many historical books I read can have almost as many pages of endnotes as pages for the book. The font size of the footnotes is usually smaller than the text copy, and I never had the interest to do a word count to check this out.

I’ve even taken books out of the library so I could read the full source of a footnote and not rely on the summary or abstraction provided in the book. Some footnotes reference articles, and my local public library has an excellent research librarian who gets me the article, and occasionally, I make use of the resources at the college where I am teaching. Not everything needs to be so exact, but sometimes you want it so.

I am not so sure how I remembered the footnote in Theodore White’s book, but it had an impact, so I remembered it, and repeated that answer and question quite a few times. If I had not read that footnote, I would have been restricted solely to Jeopardy’s Answers and Questions for these types of discussions.