Maverick Philosopher

Do I Repeat Myself?

Repetitio est mater studiorum.

Soul Survivalism

Vita mutatur non tollitur.

Vincit qui se vincit

"He conquers who conquers himself." Or as a cognate aphorism of mine has it:

Self-mastery is the highest mastery.

Self-mastery requires the mastery of both desire and aversion, not unto their extirpation as in Pali Buddhism, but sufficiently to render ordinate what is inordinate. The problem is not desire as such, but inordinate desire. Similarly for aversion.

Along the same line, and in paraphrase of Augustine,

The vicious man has as many masters as he has vices.

Or as I say, with maximal pith and precision:

Vices vitiate.

A Classicist Misanthrope Opens a Bar . . .

. . . and names it: Margaritas Ante Porcos.

An Argument for the Preservation of the Latin Rite

Étienne Gilson, writing in 1962:

Latin is the language of the Church. The sorry degradation of the liturgical texts by their translation into a gradually deteriorating vernacular emphasizes the need for the preservation of a sacred language whose very immutability protects them from the decay of taste. (The Philosopher and Theology, Cluny Media, 2020, p. 6)

Now why hadn't that argument occurred to me? It is so plainly cogent, and more apropos now than it was at the beginning of Vatican II.

'Thanks' to the internet, the degeneration of the various vernaculars is accelerating.  Attempts to hold the line are rear-guard actions in the main. There is need of a dead language to offset the liturgy's slide into the morass of leftist cultural crapola.

Death renders  immutable what was.

USA 2024

Manebant vestigia morientis libertatis: there still remained traces of dying liberty (Tacitus).

Liberty on the wane, yet traces remain. Traces enough for a foothold forward.  Time to  join the fight, Fight, FIGHT. Which side are you on? Trump-Vance 2024.  Long live the republic!

Melum ut in pluribus

I am having trouble understanding the above Latin expression. I encountered it in Theodor Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple (tr. C. Van O. Bruyn, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950) in the passage:

Not only for Augustine, but also for that Christian whose teaching is most perfectly harmonious, Thomas Aquinas, the evil in the world was always in the majority. Melum ut in pluribus. This must never be forgotten, nor was it in Kierkegaard's judgment. (pp. 29-30)

My first question: why melum and not malum?

Second question: where in Thomas can we find melum ut in pluribus?

Wiktionary informs us:

Borrowed from Ancient Greek μῆλον (mêlon). Doublet of mālum, from dialectal Ancient Greek μᾶλον (mâlon). First attested in Petronius.

Now mēlum n (genitive mēlī) means apple, and malum, mali means evil, adversity, torment, misery, punishment, etc.  This answers my first question but gives rise to a third: Is there some connection here with the Adam and Eve story in the Garden? 

Fourth question: I don't recall ever seeing the word 'apple' in my English versions of Genesis. Is there in the original text of Genesis a word that translates as 'apple'?  

Fifth question:  I don't understand ut in this context.  Wiktionary says it can be used as an adverb or as a conjunction. But it doesn't seem to be used in either way in melum ut in pluribus.

Here are some other Latin phrases most of which my astute readers already know. 

Novus Ordo?

Giving a  Latin name to the destruction of the ancient Latin rite smacks of mockery.

On Settling: Political and Marital

In politics, as in marriage, at some point you have to settle on the best available candidate, not the best. Politics is about better and worse, not about perfect and imperfect.

Qui habet aures audiendi audiat. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."  

Too Old to Lead

Bede, History of the Abbots, 16 (on Abbot Ceolfrith; tr. Christopher Grocock):

Now he saw that, being old and full of days, he could no longer prove to be an appropriate model of spiritual exercise for those under him either by teaching or by example because he was so aged and infirm. He thought over the matter long and hard, and decided that it would be more appropriate for an instruction to be given to the brothers that they should choose a more suitable father-abbot for themselves from among their own number, following the statutes of their privilege and the rule of the holy abbot Benedict.

uidit se iam senior et plenus dierum non ultra posse subditis, ob impedimentum supremae aetatis, debitam spiritalis exercitii, uel docendo uel uiuendo, praefigere formam; multa diu secum mente uersans, utilius decreuit, dato fratribus praecepto, ut iuxta sui statuta priuilegii iuxtaque regulam sancti abbatis Benedicti, de suis sibi ipsi patrem, qui aptior esset, eligerent.

Reproduced verbatim from classicist Michael Gilleland's Laudator Temporis Acti weblog. Commentary unnecessary.

Ultra posse nemo obligatur

Ought implies can. Not first with Kant!

On Strictu Dictu and Holus Bolus

Dubious Latin questioned over at Substack.

If you need an app to pray . . .

. . . I will say a prayer for you.

You don't even need the 'closet' referred to at Matt 6:6:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)

Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum in abscondito: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi. (Biblia Vulgata)

Related words: closet, claustra, enclosure, claustrophobia, exclaustration. 

Secretum Meum Mihi

On the topic of Latin mottoes, Edith Stein's is from Isaiah 24, 16:

From the ends of the earth we have heard praises, the glory of the just one. And I said: My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me: the prevaricators have prevaricated, and with the prevarication of transgressors they have prevaricated.

A finibus terrae laudes audivimus gloriam iusti et dixi secretum meum mihi secretum meum mihi vae mihi praevaricantes praevaricati sunt et praevaricatione transgressorum praevaricati sunt.

Edith Stein wrote the phrase, Secretum meum mihi ("My secret belongs to me," Mein Geheimnis gehört mir) to her friend, the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the morning after Stein's conversion experience in the summer of 1921. Her conversion was occasioned by her reading of the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila a copy of which she found in the library of Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Martius.

One is reminded of the Tolle, Lege passage  in St. Augustine's Confessions.

Vox missa nescit reverti

Good advice from Horace, Ars Poetica, 390: "A word, having been sent forth, does not know how to return." 

Of DEI and the Devil

The genitive of deus. Advocates of D.E.I. being slanderers, they are properly labeled diabolou (διαβόλου, genitive of διάβολος), "of the devil." (Anthony G. Flood)

I am as little an etymologist as I am an entomologist, but to extend Tony's riff, I have often suspected an etymological connection between the German Zweifel (doubt) and the German Teufel (devil) via the zwei (two) in the first word. The Father of Lies is duplicitous. Latin duplex, duplicis means twofold, double, divided.  Latin duplicitas, duplicitatis can mean doubleness, duplicity, deceit, ambiguity.

You have heard me say that doubt is the engine of inquiry. Admittedly, though, doubt is two-faced in that it can, driving inquiry, lead to truth, but also degenerate into denial of truth. Leftists, being duplicitous, regularly conflate doubt and denial as when they tar the right-thinking with 'climate denial' when we merely question their hysterical claims about the imminence of "boiling oceans" (Al Gore at Davos, Switzerland recently) and such other nonsense as they spew.

Hypocrisy is a from of duplicity, and who more hypocritical than the climate summit attendees who travelled by private half-filled jets to Davos when, if they themselves believed their climate claims, could have much more easily and 'environmentally' convened via Zoom. And note where they convened: in a country that, unlike the USA under the 'leadership' of the brazen liars Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, et al. actually controls its borders.  

And you still vote Democrat?

The hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, is evil at its core. I don't say that every  leftist, 'progressive,' and wokester is evil. Most of these folks are useful idiots. A large subset of them are superannuated, low-information, life-long Democrats who are pissing away their 'golden years' in empty socializing, hitting white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.

I am talking about the drivers of this demonic, duplicitous assault on civilization. Prime example here in the 'City of Angels.'

If White Supremacy is Everywhere . . .

. . . why is it so hard to find a Latin mass?

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Theodor Haecker on the Teaching of Latin and Greek

Substack latest.

Dura lex, sed lex

"The law is hard, but the law is the law." Not to a leftist, however, for whom the law is but an expression of power. Power knows no moral constraint.

Is it Better to Write in Latin or in Anglo-Saxon?

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1954), pp. 46-48. I have broken Blanshard’s one paragraph into three.

The question has often been canvassed whether it is better to write, in the main, in Latin or Anglo-Saxon. There is no doubt that one’s writing will have a different mood or atmosphere as the one element or the other predominates. A critic has suggested that if you never want to fail in dignity, you should always use the generic word rather than the specific; do not say, "If any man strike thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other"; say, "If any injury is done to thy person, do not indulge in retaliation." There is a clear difference in the tone of these two; but you will note that in converting from the specific to the general, the author has automatically translated into Latin.

Both components in the language are important; we could not do without either. But just because philosophy runs to generality, and has therefore a natural bent for the Latin, the reader is the more surprised and pleased when he finds it written in the homelier idiom. Of course many writers have never thought of asking whether their writing is predominantly Roman or Saxon. It might pay them to do so.

Raleigh thought that "imperfect acquaintance with the Latin element in English is the cause of much diffuse writing and mixed metaphor. If you talk nonsense in Saxon you are found out at once; you have a competent judge in every hearer. But put it into Latin and the nonsense masquerades as profundity of abstract thought." Unfortunately, the mask may deceive even oneself.

Latin and Greek for Philosophers

Here, by James Lesher. Sample:

Ex vi terminorum: preposition + the ablative feminine singular of vis/vis(‘force’) + the masculine genitive plural of terminus/termini (‘end’, ‘limit’, ‘term’, ‘expression’): ‘out of the force or sense of the words’ or more loosely: ‘in virtue of the meaning of the words’. ‘We can be certain ex vi terminorum that any bachelors we encounter on our trip will be unmarried.’

Uncle Bill advises,

When it comes to Latin, and not just Latin, don't throw it if you don't know it.

'Facially'

'Facially' is seeing a lot of use recently. I take it to be an English equivalent of prima facie. Some say that we should avoid Latinisms. I say instead: use them sparingly. 

What is the Opposite of 'Desuetude'?

Consuetude. Disuse versus usages and customs.  

Conseuetudines Camaldulenses: Customs of the Camaldolese. Cf. Thomas Merton, Journal, vol. 5, p. 349.

After Enough Time Passes . . .

. . . de mortuis nil nisi bonum lapses.

(In justification of  some negative remarks about  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) posted on my Facebook page. I pointed out that while McCain served with great distinction in the Vietnam war, he failed to translate military valor into civil courage, while Donald J. Trump, who did not serve, has it in spades.)

Bergoglio the Benighted Aims to End Latin Mass Permission

There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

In Vino Veritas

Literally, "in wine, (there is) truth."  But the sentence does not bear its meaning on its semantic sleeve. What the familiar Latin saying is used to express, by those who use it correctly, is the thought that a person under the influence of alcohol is less likely to dissemble and more likely to speak his mind and perhaps reveal something that he would not have revealed if sober. 

Linguistic meaning, though not reducible to use, cannot be adequately understood apart from use. 

Of 'Pussy' and 'Pusillanimous' and Politics

A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.'  As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish.

The first is whether  'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as  'pussy' when the latter is used as it is used in American slang.  I'd say it does.

The second question is whether 'pusillanimous' is etymologically derivable from 'pussy.'  No. It comes from the Latin pusillus (very  small) + animus (mind, soul) --> L. pusillanimis --> late Middle English pusillanimous. And that reminds me of a certain pusillanimous former president.

I asked a reader about a month before the 2016 election whether the graphic above was too tasteless to post to my high-toned blog, adding,  "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'"  My reader responded with a fine statement (emphasis added):

Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny.  We should go to battle with a song in our hearts.  Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”.  How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times?  Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair.  He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around.  After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake.  So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.

My reader is right.  Trump is all we've got.  And the very foundation of the Republic is at stake. He has a dubious character, but then so does Hillary.  This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers.  This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious, stealth ideologue.  That is part of what led to her defeat. People saw through her flip-flopping opportunism and refusal to come clean.

Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to principles, policies, and programs. And now, well into President Trump's first term, it is obvious that we who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades.  

Phrase of the Day: 'Infra Dig'

I just came across the following sentence in Charles R. Kesler's Claremont Review of Books article, Thinking about Trump:

It is not entirely clear whether his liberal and conservative critics disapprove of Trump because he violates moral law or because he is infra dig.

The 'infra dig' threw me for a moment until I realized it was a popularization of infra dignitatem, 'beneath (one's) dignity.' According to this source, Sir Water Scott in 1825 was the first to use the abbreviation.

I was taught to italicize foreign expressions, which is precisely what the good professor did not do in the sentence quoted. Where's my red pen?

As for the content of the sentence quoted, it is tolerably clear to me that the Never Trumpers (who are of course conservatives of a sort by definition) despise Trump mainly because the man has no class and is therefore infra dignitatem. He is not one of them. He does not have the manners and breeding of a Bill Kristol or a George Will and the rest of the effete, yap-and-scribble, but do nothing, bow-tie brigade.  He is an outsider and an interloper who threatens their privileges and perquisites.  Better Hillary and the status quo than a shake-up and take-on of the Deep State and its enablers.

On the other hand, leftists, most of them anyway, don't give a damn about the moral law as it pertains to marital fidelity and sexual behavior with the possible exception of rape. These types don't object to Trump because of locker-room talk and affairs. After all, they tolerate it in themselves and their heroes such as the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Clinton. What they are doing is right out of Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in particular, #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."  

Nor do Leftists much care that Trimp is infra dig. What leftists object to are his policies and programs, but instead of addressing them, they attack the man for failing to honor values that they themselves do not accept so as to discredit him among his supporters. 

Latin Word of the Day: Naufragium

Shipwreck

Latin Versus Italian: Differences

An enjoyable thirteen-minute video.

A Note on Vox Clamantis in Deserto

This just over the transom from London Ed:

Pedantic, but I think you will secretly enjoy it.

Matt. 3:3 quoting Isaiah 40:3. The Vulgate has Vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini. [Right, I checked both quotations in my Biblia Vulgata.] There has always been a question about the parsing of this. Is it

A voice of one calling in the wilderness, “prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”,

 as your quotation implies. Or is it

A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.

Different translations differ. Of course the ancient Hebrew/Greek may be ambiguous, as they were not cursed with the quotation mark. I shall investigate further.

[Time passes]

OK I looked further. I always wondered if Matthew knew his scripture, but checking the Isa 40:3 in the Septuagint (the Jewish Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), it is identical, i.e. Matthew’s Greek accurately reflects the Greek translation of Isaiah.

However, at least according to Pentiuc, the Septuagint Greek is a mis-translation of the Hebrew. 

According to the reading proposed by the Masoretes, this voice "cries" to the one called "to clear" the way in the wilderness (cf. Mal 3:1). Babylonian texts speak in similar terms of processional ways prepared for a god or a victorious king; this is the road by which Yahweh will lead his people through the desert in a new exodus. Quite contrary to this reading is the Septuagint's rendering, where the "voice is crying in the wilderness." This version indicates that the wilderness is the location of the mysterious voice, rather than the meeting place for God and his people returned from exile.

My emphasis. The Masoretes were the Jewish scribe-scholars who worked on the interpretation of the ancient texts.

BV: I am not competent to comment on the scholarly punctilios, , but I prefer the Septuagint reading for the (non)reason that I live in a desert. And I know Ed Abbey, the author of Vox Clamantis in Deserto, would agree for he too lived in the desert, in fact, in Oracle, Arizona, not far from here.

By the way, the preceding sentence is not good English by the lofty standards of MavPhil. Can you see why? Combox open.

Agenda Fetishism

You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off.

.....................

Agenda is the plural of agendum, something to be done. The infinitive form of the corresponding verb is agere, to do.

Age quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.

Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man.  (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.' I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.

The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'

Related articles

Val Kilmer returning to Arizona as "Tombstone" character

Nulla Dies Sine Linea: Bad Medieval Latin?

No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea?  I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it  as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written line.' I made the maxim my own, and long has she presided over my rather less distinguished scribbling.

Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,

I spotted your post today, and wondered about the gender of ‘dies’. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be ‘nullus dies’, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus / no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus / one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc. 

But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes ‘It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb’. Note that this is not about writing, but painting! 

Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. ‘Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.’ ‘Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.’  So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’,Rheinisches Museum 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written ‘nullus dies sine linea’

Very interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.

Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon."  He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea formulation.

Teaching Latin to Black Kids

An encouraging development. What happened to Ebonics?

It be a dead language, aks anyone in da hood.

Cacoethes Scribendi

The fan is on and my shirt is off. The Sonoran spring is sprung. Spring fever in the form of cacoethes scribendi has me in her sweet grip.

A weird mix of Greek and Latin, cacoethes scribendi  means compulsion to write. ‘Cacoethes’ is a Latinization of the Greek kakoethes, which combines kakos (‘bad’) with ethos (‘habit’). It can mean ‘urge,’ ‘itch,’ ‘compulsion,’ ‘mania.’ Similar constructions: cacoethes loquendi, compulsive talking, and cacoethes carpendi, a mania for fault-finding. You can see ‘carp’ lurking within the infinitive, carpere, to pluck (Cf. Eugene Ehrlich, Amo, Amas, Amat and More, Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 71-72.) To this list I add cacoethes blogendi, compulsion to blog, a compulsion with which I have been for a long time afflicted.

Aficionados of Jack Kerouac’s not-so-spontaneous spontaneous prose will recall how he got his revenge on poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth in his Dharma Bums: he bestowed upon him the name, Reinhold Cacoethes. Sweet gone Jack was a wonderful coiner of names. I’ll have to return to this topic in October, Kerouac month in my personal liturgy.

As for my own cacoethes scribendi et blogendi: once a scribbler, always a scribbler. My fifth grade teacher had us begin each day by writing a 200 word composition. At the end of the year, she announced in class that my compositions were the best she had ever seen in her teaching career. I decided right then and there to become a free-lance writer, which in a sense is what I have become. 

Moral: be careful what you wish for. Wishes and dreams are seeds. They just might fall on fertile ground. 

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Weiche dem Größeren, aber verachte nicht den Kleineren! Yield to the greater, but scorn not the lesser!  

When I first glanced at this graphic I read it as: While I concede the major (premise), I do not scorn the minor!  But that would be Maiori cedo, sed non contemno minorem.  Or at least I think that's right: I am no Latinist, though I sometimes play one in the blogosphere. Image credit.

 

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