Second, another nicely repetitive phrase: Persevera, per severa, per se vera. Looking for that info led me to a page of Graeco Roman Puzzles, which features a couple more nice Latin bits.įirst, a tongue twister: In mari meri miri mori muri necesse est, translated as “In a sea of delightful wine, a mouse may only die.” There’s an expansion of that which, although it loses the elegance of using only one word (or perhaps I mean homograph), gains the advantage of sounding like it could be a sailor’s proverb: “Malo, malo, malo, malo, malo, malo, malo, quam dente vento occurrere,” translated as “I would rather meet with a bad apple, with a bad tooth, than a bad mast with a bad wind.” (Cited in Old Glasgow and its environs: historical and topographical, by Robert Reid, in a footnote on p.
I was especially intrigued by a line apparently from Cicero: “Malo malo malo malo,” which has been translated as “I would rather be / in an apple tree / than a naughty boy / in adversity.” For a more detailed explanation, see Everything2. So I hereby declare this to be column While researching “Buffalo buffalo buffalo” for a 2009 post, naturally I came across a Wikipedia article on Latin mnemonics. I always intended to finish off those last few columns, but the more time went on, the more I felt that I would need to write something weighty and substantial for them, and the more impossible that became.īut now that I’ve combined the column site with the Neology blog, it’s feeling more like I could finish those last columns, just for completeness, without making a big fuss about them.Īnd I just came across a post that I wrote in 2009 but never published, for no reason I can see and it features the sort of mix of topics that I often featured in columns. Back in 2003, I let my Words & Stuff column stumble to an ignominious halt with column VVV, four columns from the end of the sixth alphabet worth of columns.
0 kommentar(er)
