Narratology

The list opens with o autor implícito, and the English word in that pair carries a letter with no business being there. Latin auctor meant the one who makes a thing grow, from augere, to increase; an auctor was a founder, a backer, the figure standing behind a work. Old French passed the word on as autor, and Middle English wrote it « autour » and « auctour », with no h at all. The h was pushed in later, during the centuries when our spelling was being dressed up to look classical — the same hand that gave « anchor » its h — and once it was on the page people began to sound it. Portuguese had no such accident: o autor is the Latin word with nothing added. The family is easier to see from that side, since aumentar and o aumento stand beside o autor undisguised, while « author », « augment » and « auction » look like three strangers. An auction is literally an increasing, because the price goes up. And an implied author is the auctor in the oldest sense: not a person, but the figure a book makes us imagine behind it.