Funny Search Entry of the Week

I've noticed that we sometimes receive mistaken visits by people who find the Campus through search engines, and this one amused me quite a bit:

A&G italian sexy couple

This was entered over at google.it (Italy) by someone presumably looking for a sexy Italian couple with the initials A&G, not a classics-related blog which happened to mention Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar (A&G), a retired Italian classics teacher, and what we'd been reading a couple of days before.

As for sexy, your guess is as good as mine.

Meter for the Masses

Ever wondered why that pesky, seemingly arbitrary, hiatus appears? Ever come across the term diastole (normally defined as artificial lengthening of a short syllable) and wondered why?

Well, neither is arbitrary, and actually diastole and hiatus are products of thesame phenomenon.

Diastole is derived from the old Greek grammatical term for a comma. It came to be used later as a technical term for the comma in texts which distinguishes ὅτι ('wherefore') from ὅ,τι (that).

But I digress. The primary function of the comma is to mark a kind of pause, and that's precisely what the metrical phenomenon labeled 'diastole' does.

Now, as I alluded to before the term is used in Latin prosody of a position normally counted short but which is counted long. This is a bit misleading (it seems arbitrary but it's not), so let's take a look at Catullus 64. 20 (we'll us d for dactyl and s for spondee):

tum Thetis humanos non despexit hymenaeos

This scans d-s-s-s-d-s. The phrase despexit hymenaeos is s-d-s, with the final syllable of despexit counted long. Now, initial h is never counted as a consonant and can not force the -t to close that syllable (i.e. it can't make it 'long by position'). So why is it scanned long? Why diastole?

The culprit is a 5th caesura which I found also at Aeneid 1. 720, also preceding hymenaeos: profugus | hymenaeos.

Diastole only occurs when (1) the syllable is composed of a short vowel + consonant, and (2) it is followed by a pause. Necessarily the following letter must be a vowel or h (a consonant would force the syllable to be counted long).

This pause is most often the 4th, 2nd, or 3rd foot caesura, in that order (in
Vergil at least, based on a quick glance at occurences of diastole in the Aeneid), but there are other possibilities. Vergil has a few examples of 5th foot caesura causing diastole.

Hiatus is the term used when such a pause causes a vowel-final syllable not to
be elided (again, a cursory glance at occurrences in the Aeneid shows a preference for hiatus at the 3rd foot caesura). Check out any occurrences of diastole or hiatus that you find in Latin hexameters. I'm willing to bet you'll find that caesura explains it.

I just figured this out today, so if there's anything I've missed or some deeper significance, please pass it along.

Bad Movie Latin!

I just watched the Punisher with my dad on his sweet new widescreen hi-def TV, and noticed an odd bit of Latin.

The main character talks about his military training and says he was told repeatedly sic vis pacem para bellum: 'if you want peace, prepare for war.'

Of course it should be si and not sic.

That's not so bad as far as films go. It's certainly not as bad as Rushmore's nihilo sanctum estne? which is supposed to mean 'is nothing sacred?,' but which can only mean 'in nothing there is something sacred. Isn't there?'

If I recall the Latin in Tombstone wasn't bad, even if they were only quoting proverbs to one other.

Quoth Samuel Johnson,

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth."

(Dedicated to the legacy of Jacques Derrida.)

today's quote

today's quote on my myway.com page is campus appropriate, so i thought i'd share it:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
- -- Aristotle

jacques derrida

from the corner on nro:

JACQUES DERRIDA, RIP [John J. Miller]
The French father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, has died at the age of 74, in Paris. His intellectual legacy essentially is to have articulated a theory proposing that communication is impossible. Think about that for a second, because that's what deconstruction really is: a theory that argues communication is impossible. As one critic of deconstruction has pointed out: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length."