by Ann Patty
I soon learned, playing with my artist neighbor who paints and draws with mathematical intricacy, that Scrabble is as much a visual as a word game—that those who can grok the board and have refined pattern recognition skills are the best players. It’s not long, fancy words (or anything less than seven letters) that win the game, but seizing all opportunities to score double and triple points. It’s all about where you are on the board, not what you’ve got in your array. Knowledge of obscure two- and three-letter words is essential, as well as knowing the many uses of prefixes and suffixes to make compound words. Latin should have helped me there, but it took time. I was on a steep learning curve.
I began to cheat. How could I not, with the Scrabble Word Finder a mere click away, instantaneously delivering all sorts of words out of the jumble of letters before me? Many new -id words appeared: ootid, nitid, irid. Most of them, alas, proved unworthy of joining my House of Ids, as they were neologisms created by science, and not in the general lexicon. Nor did I use them in Scrabble. I warned my opponents that I sometimes used Word Finder but had set myself an exclusionary rule: I wouldn’t use in Scrabble any word I did not already know, and might come up with myself, had I the patience. Soon I changed that rule to a stricter one: I could use the Word Finder only if I suspected I had a seven-letter word because I had one or two blanks in my letter array. It just wasn’t worth the time fiddling with the letters to find it—it was too much like moving around paragraphs in the manuscript I was rewriting, and didn’t feel as rewarding as parsing Latin words and sentences.
I set myself the goal of reviewing one Catullus poem every week, though I can’t say I was successful. Translating Latin poetry required much the same discipline as editing books. Because Latin allows the writer to place nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs any damn place he likes for the purposes of scansion or emphasis, the words must be moved hither and yon to form a coherent English phrase, much as words, paragraphs, and characters often need to be moved around to make a better book. An editor is, in essence, a scholar of the manuscript she is working on, especially in fiction, in which subtleties must be ferreted out and enhanced, much as they are in Latin poetry. An editor must read a work two, three, four times to help the writer get it right—not so many times as it took me to translate Latin verse, but the deep engagement with a text is similar.
June, my favorite month, arrived. In June, the garden is in its glory and the deer haven’t yet made their first feast of everything that blooms. In June, my friend Steve visits for the month, installing himself in the guest room above the barn. In June, I live with both my “husbands,” one straight, one gay, the paradigm set so long ago with Secret, Humphrey, and me. Like me, Steve was an editor/publisher who fell victim to the 2008 downsizing. He is also a former Latin scholar. He attended the Latin School in Chicago and minored in classics at Lawrence University. That meant he had studied as much or more Latin than I had French. He is the most indulgent, even enthusiastic, of my friends about my Latin pursuit. He loves to talk grammar and words with me.
George enjoys Steve as much as I do. He knows my relationship with Steve predated mine with him by many years. Not to mention, when he’s here, George is allowed to enjoy the quiet recesses of his brain while Steve and I keep up an almost constant chatter about this, that, nothing, and everything.
Since I was failing to translate my weekly Catullus, I decided one Sunday to collect every Latin phrase I came across in that day’s New York Times (I disallowed crossword puzzle clues).
Here’s what I found: per se, ad hoc, curriculum vitae, ad infinitum, in extremis, quid pro quo, habeas corpus, pari passu, and nunc dimittis. The latter was used in an op-ed piece by Oliver Sacks. After stating that speaking “no languages but my mother tongue” was one of his signal regrets, he went on to say, “Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis—‘I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.’”
And regret he should: nunc dimittis actually means “now you are dismissing,” or “now you put down.” It is the title of a canticle from a text in Luke 2: Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace (Now you dismiss your servant in peace, God, following your word). How could the Times copyeditor allow so brilliant a writer as Oliver Sacks to employ such a loose translation just to throw in a fancy Latin phrase? Though one could argue that, if one knows the full verse, the two phrases convey a similar meaning, we ultracrepidarians are very persnickety.
Which leads me to the word absquatulate (to depart in a hurry, to decamp, to die), which a friend had recently sent me as a present. It, however, is a mock-Latin word made from ab (away) and ate (to act upon) affixed to either end of the made-up Latin stem squatul (to squat), so it literally would mean, “to go off and squat elsewhere.” This word comes from nineteenth-century midwestern and western American attempts to sound learned. Perhaps, since Oliver Sacks laments knowing no language but English, he should have used absquatulate rather than nunc dimittis.
That exercise clearly revealed that Latin is not a dead language but an undead language—a ghost shadowing many of our words, a zombie showing up in sentences, haunting the living language.
Perhaps Latin as a zombie language can become the latest teen craze, zombies and ghosts being all the rage in movies and books. Latin is even au courant with the new categories of gender. Clearly the neologism cisgender comes from the Latin preposition cis, meaning “this side.” It must have been inspired by the Roman concepts of cisalpine and transalpine (our side of the Alps, and the other side of the Alps). So a cisgender identifies with the genitals she or he is born with, while a transgender identifies with the opposite. What would the Romans have thought of a world without a normative gender?
Latin even haunts comedy. The opening credits of John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight, feature thirty-seven Latin and fake Latin captions, from tempus fugit under an hourglass, to the made-up Hostus Mostus under an illustration of John Oliver, to insanus maximus for the state of Florida.
One day I invited Curtis to lunch with us. Though he was still being put through the tortures of Job, interviewing for tenure-track positions while hoping that one might open up at Vassar, Vassar was finding various ways to keep him on. Curtis remained my touchstone, the young man who had allowed my life new purpose: my Latin father and son. He was also kind enough to suggest he give me a tutorial on all the Latin study aids available on the Internet. And I knew he and Steve would enjoy each other.
Curtis was funny and wry, untroubled by Augie, who fixed himself before him and longingly stared as Curtis ate his hamburger: Augie always figured the guest was the easiest mark. Curtis was unflappable, serenely ignoring Augie while we discussed obscure parts of speech.
Over the special rhubarb cake I’d made for dessert, Curtis offered a new one: the epexegetical infinitive, in which the infinitive explains the subject (“epexegesis” means additional information or explanatory material). The example he gave us was “Cake is good ‘to eat’” (“to eat” being the epexegetical infinitive).
Curtis also recommended Basil Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, the summum of Latin grammars in English, which included every recondite usage and was replete with the sort of footnoted explanations he and I loved. Gildersleeve was the top American classicist of the nineteenth century, as well as the inventor of graduate school in America.
Curtis was my only source of gossip about the students and professors at Vassar. I was relieved to learn that the dullness of our cohort the previous year was well known and often lamented among the professors of the department.
I asked if Curtis happened to know the fate of dear Roger and if he was able to get the grade he needed for his junior year abroad.
“Bert made a deal with him,” Curtis said. “He would be generous with his grade with the proviso that Roger never take another class in the GRST department as long as he was at Vassar.”
We all burst out laughing. What
a brilliant solution, at one stroke both sparing professors a classical dullard and obviating any future demands Roger’s father might make about classical studies.
After lunch Steve retired to his guesthouse, knowing this was a lunch with a learning agenda. I turned the conversation to my latest passion: adverbs ending in -im. Like the adjectival English -ids, most adverbial -ims were back-formed from Latin nouns ending in -us. They seemed to me the first worthy successors I had found to the -ids, though so far I had only ten of them. Curtis gave me a few new -im words, then we moved to my computer, where he showed me a site, the Packard Humanities Institute, that contained all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200. It offered not only a word search and an author search but also a concordance. The latter allowed me to type im# and, abracadabra, up came all the places where an ancient author used a word ending with -im. This was a momentary thrill, with one ruinous problem: The search turned up 42,818 instances of such words.
I consulted the first few pages: 95 percent of the entries were enim, which means, variously, “for, for instance, namely, in fact, I mean.” It was a very popular word. Also among the -ims were the forms and subforms of the first-person subjunctive verb sum, esse (to be), in its many tenses, such as fuerim (I should have existed), possim (I should be able to), as well as the first-person perfect subjunctive ending of all verbs in the second, third, and fourth conjugations and the numbers eleven through seventeen, from undecim to septemdecim.
I allowed none of the above onto my list. The -ims were clearly quite a bit less exclusive than the more selective English -ids. I would later discover, when I read Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, that he, too, was inordinately fond of -ims. He even made a few up, and it took only one usage by a classical author for a word to be included in the Latin lexicon.
Using the concordance for enlarging the -ims, I realized, was rather like using the Scrabble Word Finder. I vowed not to consult the concordance again, to add to my list only those -ims I come across in my reading or conversations (in Latin, hahahahha), though sneaking a quick peak at it now and again has proved irresistible. Soon I had enough for an addition to my house: the Im Shed.
Over the next two days, there followed an e-mail exchange between Curtis and me. “Would Bona placenta est edere (Cake is good to eat) be a proper translation of your example of the epexegetical infinitive?” (Yes, friends, placenta means “cake” in Latin!)
Curtis responded that I would need to make my meaning more clear with word order—“the epexegetical infinitive usually follows immediately after its adjective. So it would be something like placenta est bona edere. But I’m afraid that the example I gave you may not be idiomatic Latin. You can now check me on stuff like this: if you look up the adjective dignus in Lewis & Short you will find that it can be used ‘With inf.’: e.g., in Horace dignus describi (worthy to be described). And if you look up peritus it too is used with an infinitive, as in Tacitus’ peritus obsequi (skilled in submitting oneself [to another]). And if you look up aptus you will find that Ovid describes an aetas apta regi (a period fit to be ruled). But if you look up bonus -a -um you will not find any uses of it with the infinitive. So I’m afraid you need a different example sentence. My fault.”
I decided to try again: “How about: Mala placenta est edere seni et pingui (It is a bad thing for an old and fat person to eat cake).”
As always, Curtis had another correction: “This sentence can be rescued by a simple change: Malum placentam est edere seni et pingui. Personally, I feel a Roman would say it in the plural, senibus pinguibusque, and I think he would find a more stylish place to put the datives. Perhaps: Placentam edere senibus pinguibusque est malum.”
I showed the exchange to Steve, which led to a long discussion about the true differences between the editor and the scholar: the editor is a dilettante flitting from one subject to the next dictated by whichever manuscript is up next, whereas the scholar digs deeply into one bit of soil, learning every molecule of its composition and what role each might play in a plant’s growth.
QED: Nothing in Latin is as simple as it may appear, and true scholarship is very time-consuming.
In early July, Steve left, and I was back to work on rewriting manuscripts. July and August were always long months for me, with no structure but whatever I had scratched together for myself. Though I loved summer, I might have wished it shorter. Steve had told me something he always remembered, that his tenth-grade Latin teacher, Ruth Nelson, had taught him about July and August.
“When Caesar reworked the calendar beginning in 44 B.C. and Augustus finished the project after Caesar’s death, each renamed the month of his birth: Caesar substituted July (Julius) for Quintilis, and Augustus renamed Sextilis August. They wanted to make sure their months were among the longest, so they each stole a day from February. Since it was the most dispiriting month, no one minded.”
I researched this assertion. The old calendar, which Julius Caesar replaced, had comprised 12 lunar months and 355 days. That calendar had begun at the spring equinox in March (Martius, after the god of war). Even then, February was the odd month, consisting of 28 days, a number considered unfavorable and thus appropriate to the month designated for purification (or for us who live in the Northeast, the most unendurable of the months, which we are grateful is a bit short). The new Julian calendar began in January and consisted of 12 months and 365 days, with February adding a “leap day” every four years. To make up for the days missing from the shorter calendar, two extra days were added to January, August, and December, and one extra day was added to April, June, September, and November. So Ruth Nelson was partially correct: Augustus did get an extra day, but Julius had his from the get-go.
Unlike the elegant economy of the language, the way the Romans counted the days seemed ridiculously cumbersome. Perhaps because their inflected language had so accustomed them to reading backwards, Romans counted days backwards, too. There were three fixed points in the month from which they counted: the Kalends, the Nones, and the Ides. The Kalends was the first day of the month; the Nones (named such because they were nine days before the Ides) were either the fifth or seventh day of the month. The Ides fell on the fifteenth if the month was long, and on the thirteenth if the month was short. The day before the Kalends (or Nones or Ides) was called pridie Kalends or ii Kalends, the day before that iii Kalends, et cetera. Therefore my birthday, March 22, would translate as x Kalends April, or as abbreviated in a Latin text: a.d. x Kal. Apr. (a.d. is the abbreviation for ante diem which means “before the day”).
On a.d. ii Ides July, Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar arrived: 567 pages in densely packed 8-point type, a forbidding volume that might well have contributed to giving the study of Latin a bad name.
Paging through the beginning, which was much like most grammars, laying out the parts of speech, the declensions, and conjugations, I was thrilled to find on page 123 “Formation of Words.” First, there were two pages on the formation of substantives, ranging from agency (indicated by endings of -tor, -tric, -trix), diminutives (-lo, -la, and -lus) and, behold, on page 127, a list of “The Suffixes in Detail,” which gave a breakdown of Latin nouns and adjectives arranged by suffix: Out of 250 entries, not one -id appeared. Adding insult to injury, Gildersleeve didn’t include adverbs in “The Suffixes in Detail,” so I learned no new -ims.
I decided to rest my brain with a game of Scrabble. I scored my highest word ever—unstrung—for 131 points. And believe it or not, I found it all by myself.
CHAPTER 8
Disce quasi semper victurus; vive quasi cras moriturus.
Learn as though you will live forever; live as though you will die tomorrow.
—St. Edmund of Abingdon
My third year of studies was one of consolidation and consolation, poetry and lost possessions. Fall semester I studied the lyric poets at Vassar, spring semester Ovid at Bard. James Romm, the Latinist at Bard who didn’t allow first-year auditor
s, had contacted me in August through Facebook of all places, wanting to consult with me about his book, which had been recently published, and the next on which he was working. At the end of our meeting, I reminded him, “You probably don’t remember, but I contacted you two years ago about taking your beginning Latin class. I’ve since been attending Vassar.”
He didn’t remember that e-mail exchange but said, “You’re clearly a serious student. You’re welcome to audit a class with me at Bard if you like.”
Since I’d already asked permission from the professor at Vassar, Rob Brown, to attend his lyric poetry class, I stuck to Vassar for the fall but used James’s kind agency to shorten my winter commute and study Ovid at Bard with his colleague Ben Stevens during spring semester. It would be like my junior semester abroad. How odd that modern social media facilitated expanding my ancient pursuit.
I was now taking 300-level classes, the advanced level. The lyric poetry class at Vassar was larger than last years’ intermediate classes: There were seven students, including me. Only one student, Naftali, was there from last year—Alissa had gone off to Rome for her junior year abroad, and Roger, having fulfilled his indentured Latin servitude, wouldn’t be seen again in the department. It was explained to me that the advanced classes are often bigger than intermediate because some students come to them in their freshman year, after having taken advanced placement courses in high school.
