I took two years of Latin in high school and our teacher Mrs. Albritton was able to instill in me a respect and admiration with how precise the language is. A noun in Latin, for example, can have a number of meanings just by changing its suffix. The noun manus for "hand" can mean "with or by hands" by changing it manibus. The -bus suffix is quite common and also appears when res for "thing" becomes rebus meaning "with or by things".
We see an illustration of this in what's called a rebus puzzle. For example, the solution to the drawings of an eye plus a can plus a sea plus a female sheep would be "I can see you". There was even a TV quiz show (Concentration) where contestants had to solve rebus puzzles to win prizes.
When I first encountered "rebus" used to refer to a crossword puzzle that had multiple letters in a single grid square, I thought that was wrong. If you're going to use a word from Latin for that, it should be litteris (by way of or with letters) or verbis (by way of or with words). But I thought "No big deal" so I wasn't motivate to speak up about the error.
That changed in 2020 when I watched the PBS Nova show "A to Z: the First Alphabet" in which "The Rebus Principle" was used to describe how writing went from pictographs and hieroglyphics to modern alphabets. Here's the relevant excerpt from the show's script:
[begin quote] NARRATOR: Such pictograms would be the basic building blocks of the first writing systems. And thousands of tablets like this one suggest that the reason for moving beyond a purely oral culture was something utterly prosaic: the need to keep ledgers. As far as we can tell from the evidence, for several centuries, the use of pictograms was limited to primitive accountancy. But then, sometime around 3000 B.C. there was the crucial conceptual leap.
IRVING FINKEL: The giant leap came when somebody conceived of this matter: that you could draw a picture which represented something that someone could recognize, but at the same time that sign could be used just for the sound of the thing it looked like. So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley. Now the word for barley in Sumerian is, is pronounced like “sheh.” So your Sumerian sees this and says “ah, “sheh,” “barley.” But at the same time, this scribe or a fellow scribe, in writing a totally different kind of document, could use this sign not to mean barley, but just to write the sound of “sheh.” And this giant leap is something rather simple, and it’s something which could have occurred to a child, but nevertheless it is of great lasting significance.
NARRATOR: Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called the “rebus principle,” and it allows pictures to spell out words.
IRVING FINKEL: To give a really clear example. There’s a word “shega” in Sumerian, which means “beautiful” or “pretty” or “nice” or something like that. And so a scribe would write it syllabically, “she” “ga.” So, he would use this sign, the barley sign, for the “she” bit, and then he’d have to write “ga” for the second bit. As it happens, “ga” means milk. So, he would draw the picture which represented milk. And barley and milk together would spell “shega,” which had nothing to do with either barley or milk. So, this is a kind of rebus writing. Rebus is a smart word for it. It is really a pun in some sense. It is a kind of pun that you get another meaning out of the sign. [end quote]
When I came to this part of the program I had an "aha!" experience, sort of an epiphany lite. And my attitude about the misuse of "rebus" in crosswords changed. It was no longer a minor matter not really worth the effort to try to correct but now a much more serious one because "rebus" is presently used by learned scholars---historians, linguists, philologists, Egyptologists and the like---in a very different way, much closer to its Latin definition, "by way of things", than to how it is used in crosswords, "with multiple letters in a single puzzle grid square".
So my question is can we continue to bring discredit to the crossword community by using a Latin word in a very different way than it is being used by contemporary scholars? And these are people who crossword world should hold in high esteem and respect and not use one of their core terms in a blatantly incorrect way.
By the time we get to letters we have gone past the Rebus Principle. Multiple letters in a single grid square do not a rebus make. Non rebus sed litteris, not with things but with letters. If the letters form an actual word then it would be Non rebus sed verbis, not with things but with words.
