February 23, 2001

Finding Truth and Falsehood in a Comma: the World of Dusty Philologists

By RACHEL TOOR

"Why are you going to a convention of stamp collectors?"

That was the response I got from some of my friends, many of them academics, when I told them I was planning to attend a recent meeting of the American Philological Association.

Part of the reason that I had wanted to go to the meeting was to figure out what, exactly, philology is, and why anyone should care about it. The American Philological Association would more properly be called something like the Brotherhood of