ante diem viii idus decembres

• nothing ... not even a well-attested martyr

::Monday, December 06, 2004 6:02:26 AM::

We'll begin the week at Travlang, which tells us 'vegetarian' in Latin would be vegetarius, although that word strikes me as being a person in charge of 'exciting' things or, perhaps, who fights with vegetables ("And indeed, Hannibal's forces did easily cut through the line of vegetarii, armed with freshly-harvested Italian zucchini ... " -- a gloss on an old Monty Python skit?). In any event, here are the more etymologically sound selections:

genuflect @ dictionary.com

circumvent @ Merriam-Webster

quaquaversal @ Worthless Word for the Day (gotta use this one)

occultation @ Guru.net

... and over at Wordsmith, we read about contango, which sounds/looks like it should be Classical, but apparently isn't.

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:59:12 AM::

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:48:50 AM::

I think I missed last week's headlines from YLE's Nuntii Latini, so here they are:

Rerum in Ucraina condicio (3.12.2004)

Graeci poena afficientur (3.12.2004)

Explosio in carbonifodina (3.12.2004)

De dissidentibus in Cuba (3.12.2004)

Canariae locustis vexatae (3.12.2004)

Recitatio

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:41:18 AM::

Latest headlines from Akropolis World News in Classical Greek:

Pyramid tomb may be sacrifice site - Madrid blasts after ETA warning

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:39:01 AM::

A piece in the New Yorker about Pluto, North Dakota provides this little excerpt on the origins of the town's name:

My old high-school friend Neve Harp, salutatorian of the class of 1942 and fellow historical-society member, is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator and surveyor Frank Harp, who came with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Townsite Company to establish a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit, of course. These townsites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risktakers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers in every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.

The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and in naming their sites had used up the few words they knew of Sioux or Chippewa, presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, and the names of their girlfriends and wives. The Greek and Roman gods intrigued them. To the east lay the neatly marked out townsites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto, and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. This occurred in the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before the planet Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony now that the planet is the coldest, the loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable in our solar system—but that was never, of course, intended to reflect upon our little municipality.

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:29:54 AM::

From and editorial at the Daily Breeze:

I recently heard a discussion featuring Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, a superb thinker and writer and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a West Coast think tank where I have been a media fellow. Hanson said Rome thrived when Romans thought it a wonderful thing to be Romans, and that it disintegrated when they no longer valued being Roman. He worried aloud that Americans no longer recognize how exceptional they are in history. A problem, he said, is that we are forever measuring ourselves against perfection instead of against other societies. Next to them we fare extremely well.

Do you suppose this is referring obliquely to Caracalla's grant of citizenship? If so, there was an interesting little bit of comparanda over the weekend when Hungary conducted a referendum on whether to grant citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living outside Hungary. The referendum ultimately failed (i.e. no citizenship grant) but not because so many voted against it, but because not enough voted in the first place. So now I'm beginning to wonder ... did the ancient Romans have a sense of nationality? Ethnicity? What did they think of when they referred to 'patria'?

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:16:35 AM::

4.00 p.m. |DCIVC| Antony & Cleopatra: Battle at Actium
dna

DCIVC = Discovery Civilization (Canada)

::Monday, December 06, 2004 5:05:59 AM::