locus classicus

From New Latin locus classicus (literally “classical place”).

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locus classicus (plural loci classici)

1. An authoritative passage from a standard work that is often quoted as an illustration; a classic case or example.
   • 1847, Thomas De Quincey, “Protestantism”, in Theological Essays and Other Papers‎, volume 1:

     This famous passage of Scripture, this locus classicus, or prerogative text, pleaded for the verbatim et literatim inspiration of the Bible, is the following; and I will so exhibit its very words as that the reader, even if no Grecian, may understand the point in litigation.

   • 1881, Frederic W. H. Myers, Wordsworth‎:

     The Lines written above Tintern Abbey have become, as it were, the locus classicus or consecrated formulary of the Wordsworthian faith.

   • 1898, Henry A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century‎:

     Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous—“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers,”—perhaps the most hackneyed locus classicus in the entire work; or as the lines beginning, […]

   • 1913, George Saintsbury, The English Novel‎:

     There is a well-known locus classicus from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.

   • 2003, “Fossil Inc. v Trimset Limited and Goodwill Watch Industrial Company Limited”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)‎, paragraph 12:

     The locus classicus is contained in the judgment of the eminent American copyright judge Story J. in Emerson v. Davies […] as follows:

2. (biology) The locality from which a taxon was first described.