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Editorial Note Elizabeth Drinker's diary falls somewhere between a hislOrical and a literary document. Although its primary value is historical, readers can enjoy both contcnt and form. Similarly, it falls somcwhere between a private and a public document: private in the scnse that it was not meant to be published, public because the volumes were open to the scrutiny of others, both in her time and ours. The journal, like any other document, presents the usual problems with regard to editorial procedure. The primary task was to ensure a faithful reproduction of the unabridged text without sacrificing readability. This balance required certain textual modifications, but the result is a nearly literal transcription of the original manuscript that retains, with minor exceptions, Elizabeth Drinker's spelling and punctuation. The modifications are as follows: Superscript letters have been brought down to the baseline, and common nouns abbreviated in this manner have been silently expanded, with the period below the superscript letter omitted. The words so altered are about, account, appeared, company, CQuld, daughter, dear, deceased, ditto, doclOr, dollars, evening, friend, instant, meeting, morning, neighbor, o'clock, paid, pair, quarrer, received, said, should, supped, tesrimony, ultimo, wirh, would. The superscript letters of proper nouns, including titles such as Nr. (Neighbor ), Fd. (Friend), and Dr. (Doctor), have been dropped to the baseline, but the words have not been expanded, on the theory that abbreviated names are ambiguous ("Jos.," (or example, could refer to joseph, josiah, or joshua); also, it seems more reasonable to apply a consistent rule to aUproper nouns than to expand some and not others. The (ew abbreviated words within the text that contain no superscript letters have not been expanded. Editorial Note xxviii The thorn (ye, yt) has been replaced by th (tlu, that). Punctuation has been retained exactly as it appears in the original manuscript with the following exceptions: 1. A period. completes each daily entry no maner what punctuation mark Drinker used. 2. All dashes within the text that indicate a pause or change of thought are reproduced as em dashes (-) regardless of their size in the manuscript. Dashes to till an incomplete line or to mark the end of an entry have been eliminated. 3. A colon or comma after the first initial of a name has been replaced with a period. Thus "J: Logan" in the manuscript appears as " j. Logan" in the published version. In the case of names such as McKean where Drinker wrote a superscript c, the letter has been brought down to the baseline and the period. under the c eliminated. 4. The period following the s in possessive superscript names such as ]amess has been deleted. Elizabeth Drinker's handwriting is extremely legible, and the manuscript volumes are generally in good condition. Nevertheless, use has taken its toll, and there are the usual smudges, holes, and even an occasional tooth mark where a mouse has sampled a page corner. In such cases, letters or words transcribed with difficulty are surrounded by a bracket, and totally illegible ones are represented by an empty bracket. Regretfully, the reader will not know how many letters or words are missing in the latter situation, since this was often impossible to determine. Since ED's capital!,], T, and S are almost totally indistinguishable from one another, they frequently appear in brackets when used as initials in place of a name. Entries on loose pages that were erroneously inserted in the manuscript volumes at some undetermined time have been silently placed in their proper chronological order. Annotation The focus of the annotation is explanatory rather than interpretive, the assumption being that the editor's role is to present the text with as little bias and as much neutrality as possible. Toward that end, the annotation seeks to clarify entries where the meaning is elusive, and to expand where the information ED relays is insufficient for the reader to understand a situation. Only words omitted from standard English dictionaries are defined. Since the annotation is intended merely to support, the notes have been written and edited with an eye toward brevity. Many notes, however, include citations that allow the reader to explore a subject in greater detail. Except for those occasions where Drinker corrects herself by crossing out a word inadvertently misspelled or repeated, her deletions have been restored in the form of annotation, since they represent information that she chose to remove from the reader's view for one reason or another. The deleted words, [18.117...

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