Maureen Dowd does Latin; Mary Beard comments [via PR].
This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 @ 7:57 am on the category americana, latin.
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Did you know Mary Beard’s son is at Balliol? He’s now a third year classicist.
↓ Quote | Posted 14 October, 2008, 1:50 pmI think I did know that, though I don’t think I know him.
↓ Quote | Posted 14 October, 2008, 1:55 pmBeard shouldn’t be snooty about dog Latin. It’s a fine old tradition at least back to “Implent in the Corn and High/Plurrimi motores bi”. OK, Dowd’s grammar is a bit dodgy, but Palin’s grammar is dodgy in English after all.
↓ Quote | Posted 14 October, 2008, 4:52 pmQuis ut Deus, was my old school’s motto. Nobody ever really understood what it meant.
↓ Quote | Posted 14 October, 2008, 5:28 pmThis reminds me of my days spent teaching Latin; the pitfalls of dodgy equivalents were illustrated by one text-book, the ‘Oxford Latin Course,’ which glossed ‘populares’ as ‘lefties’ if memory serves. And, before that, doing continuous Latin prose composition at school in the mid 1960s we were given a newspaper account of some event in the Vietnam War and my classics teacher suggested that Ho Chi Minh should be translated by ‘Vercingetorix’….which made some sense, I suppose.
↓ Quote | Posted 17 October, 2008, 7:02 pm“my classics teacher suggested that Ho Chi Minh should be translated by ‘Vercingetorix’….which made some sense, I suppose”
↓ Quote | Posted 18 October, 2008, 6:22 pmYes — though Ho was rather more successful …
At one points some friends of mine and I had a game of trying to match contemporary political figures with figures from classical history — but I completely forget all of the results. (There was also the game of identifying contemporary figures with characters from The Godfather — and best of all, identifying Biblical characters with characters from The Godfather. I remember that Joab was identified, I thought aptly, with Luca Brasi).
In retrospect, it seems we had a lot of free time as undergraduates. Perhaps too much.