Passim
Passim ( Latin ), German `` everywhere '', `` here and there '', is a technical term that is used in scientific texts instead of specific page references, when no specific line or paragraph on the subject can be given, but the facts get through pulls the entire text or a large piece of text.
As a rule , passim can be found in the footnotes and endnotes as well as in the person and subject indexes of scientific works. The expression is usually not used to substantiate important information (which are substantiated with specific page numbers), but only to refer to the basic availability of evidence for rather insignificant information that hardly requires any evidence. Furthermore, it serves as an indication that in the work or the source to which one relies, in addition to the specific evidence with page numbers for a certain claim, there are numerous other details that justify this claim, but which one, however, in order to avoid redundancies, not additionally listed.
Examples of usage
In footnotes and endnotes
For example, a line of text in a historical work could read: “ Bismarck was known to be an extremely irascible man with an irritable temperament”. At the end of the sentence there is a prime number that refers to a footnote at the bottom of the page. The accompanying footnote reads “Canis, Bismarck , passim”. Then this means that in the relevant book by the historian Canis about the politician Bismarck, incidents are listed in various places that prove the assertion of the author of the sentence quoted above, but that these references are so numerous that it would go beyond the scope of a footnote to list them all in detail, e.g. B. to write: “Cf. Pp. 12, 29, 46, 58, 112, 119, 246 etc. ”Instead, reference is only made to their basic presence throughout the text.
In registers
The word passim is often found in registers as a display word that indicates that a term, in addition to being mentioned in important contexts (which are referenced with a specific page number) in the book in question, also appears very often in rather insignificant contexts that are only fundamentally , but not by referring to specific individual pages.
In the subject index of any book, for example, the keyword “end of the war” could be followed by: “S. 9, 14, 26, 48, 144 and passim ”(analogous to this:“ Chap. 7 et passim ”). This indicates that the explanations on the topic of "end of the war" on the numbered pages are so important that it is worth looking up for the average reader, but that there are also various other mentions of the word in the present book but are so insignificant to most readers that it would usually be inexpedient to look them up. However, so that the reader knows that the mention of the word is not limited to the (important) places referenced with page numbers, but that there are others, the word passim is added.
