Scribendi

Originally entitled UNM Honors Review, the magazine changed its name to Scribendi in 1995 to reflect the fact that it had grown from a UNM publication into a regional publication for honors students. The students who came up with the new title for the magazine wanted something that would reflect both a focus on the written word and the traditions associated with honors education and excellence. They settled on the Latin term, scribendi.

While the exact identification of the term’s parsing has been debated, it appears in a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a noted philologist of his time and a scholar intimately familiar with classical languages. In Tolkien’s letter, he writes, “I have been possessed on occasions (few, happily) with a sort of furor scribendi, in which the pen finds the words rather than head or heart” (Humphrey Carpenter, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 113). This sense gets at what the 1995 editors of Scribendi were intending when they retitled the magazine.

But, what does that title mean?

In 2003, Classics major and Scribendi Editor Lindsey Lesch prepared the following analysis for the back cover of that year’s issue:
     SCRI•BÉN•DI / skribéndee /
          participle (nom., pl., masc., gerundive/future passive part. of
          scribo, scribere - 3rd conj. — “to write”)
          LATIN. Those which must be written.