latina servanda est

a. d. ix Kal. Jul. ann. dom. MMIX

schola est, cuius duces studium linguae Latinae abolere susciperunt....

A local girl's academy, arguably one of the best in the nation, is phasing out Latin. The motive is economic: in these hard times — and they are hard, make no mistake — underperforming programs must be cut.

Which school? Ah, well, that would be telling. In the interest of decorum and tact (yeah, yeah, I know) let's leave names out of it for now. Suffice it to say that you would know which school if you combined, rebus-style, the first name of a match-making Jane Austen heroine with the first name of a movie misfit who trains large rodents to do his bidding.

Ever the activist, one of my colleagues spearheaded a letter-writing campaign. Here's the salient text of his letter, which not only makes a good argument for the preservation of Latin in the most difficult of circumstances, but also quotes the school's Latin mottoes in the process. Impolitic? Perhaps. Delectable? certe.

We are saddened to learn that [name of school] has decided to phase out the teaching and learning of Latin. While we appreciate the challenges that your institution, indeed all of our institutions, face in these difficult times, we hope you will reconsider this decision. We see the loss of Latin at [name of school] as a loss for your students, your school, and all of us who value educational excellence.

As one of the nation’s leading college preparatory schools for young women, [name of school] has fashioned a reputation for unsurpassed excellence. Those graduates who matriculate at our nation’s colleges and universities rank among the finest students enrolled and bring with them the renown and the high aspirations of their alma mater. That reputation, and those aspirations, have been fostered by a diverse and exciting curriculum that offers young women the full spectrum of disciplines, perspectives, and ideas. In our judgment, the decision you have made to eliminate Latin from the curriculum runs contrary to [name of school]’s historic mission and will deprive current and future students linguistic and literary windows on a profound culture.

All of the data, both regional and national, demonstrate a continuing upsurge in interest in the study of Latin. In the Capital District, Saratoga Springs H.S. teaches 225 students in Latin, and Shenendehowa High enrolls 425 [editor's note: !!!]. And, at [names of baccalaureate institutions], Latin and Classics are thriving, and annually we witness exceptional achievement from our students as a result of studying Latin and ancient Greek. The intellectual discipline that these languages demand distinguishes our students, who routinely apply their studies in Classics to the challenges of contemporary society. Latin and Greek don’t just expose students to two ancient civilizations; they equip students with the requisite skills to meet the challenges of a global and complicated world.

...This is not the time to cut a program that has been at the heart of [name of school]’s academic program for nearly two hundred years. Indeed, your school’s mottoes strike us as particularly apt to this issue: gaudet patientia duris, “Patience rejoices in adversity,” and semper fidelis, “Always faithful.” How ironic it would be if a school with such a commitment to perseverance, to its traditions, and to the value of knowing Latin would discard that commitment.

Respectfully, etc.

domi

15 giugno 2008

Sto sedendomi qui nella cucina familiare a Milwaukee, preparante la cena di domani, bevente un po', e pensante a molte cose -- sopratutto al passato. Come mai? Perche non ho habitato in questa città per molti anni ed ci ho viaggiato da solo per fornire assistenza ai miei genitori nella loro traslocazione.

Allora, naturalmente viene in mente il passato: curiosamente, è non solo il passato lontano, quando ero stato giovane, ma anche il passato recente, quando ho fatto il professore. La verità: ho passato tutta la settimana nel passato!

Quest'ossessione ho cominciato quando, arrivando in città, sono andato a casa nell'autobus in cui andavo sempre da scuola: il numero 57. L'ossessione è stata continuata quando mi sono abbonato a Facebook, poi ho ordinato le fotografie vecchie della famiglia, e poi sono uscito a bere qualcosa con un amico dall'università ed il giorno prossimo a mangiare qualcosa con i miei cugini. Tanta nostalgia! Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura!

Ma adesso ho la massima nostalgia di mia moglie e mia figlia, e vorrei molto ritornare in un posto dove la maggiorparte delle cure è del presente e del futuro.

certamen periculosum

a. d. iii Kal. Mai. ann. dom. MMIX

debeo narrare certamen periculosum, quod non optavi, sed in quo invitus implicatus sum....

Okay, so there's a win-a-new-car contest currently being hosted by my least favorite local radio station. The listener who correctly decodes the clues and finds the car can claim it for himself or herself. Someone gets a free car, the station and the dealership get to look munificent in a terrible economy — it's win-win all around, right?

Wrong.

The back-story invented for the contest is that one of the station interns has absconded with said car. Listeners, if they believe they have spotted the intern, must approach her and demand the car using the officially-mandated phrase.

Do you see the problem yet?

Well, did I mention that my wife, who works in the heart of the station's broadcast area, less than two months ago bought a car identical to the one being given away (exact make, model, and color) from the very same dealership?

How about now?

No? Last week someone tailed my wife all the way home from work (about 40 miles), pulled into our driveway, and demanded the car. (I guess she did say, "Please," which is technically not part of the magic phrase.) Luckily, she was sane and took "no" for an answer.

Another one. This past Monday two men driving in the opposite direction from my wife spotted her car at an intersection, got out of the right-turn lane and into the left-turn lane, and began to follow her home. She lost them on the way by taking some back roads, but got home really late after all that.

This is harassment. What else to call it? Before you tell me that I'm overreacting, let me make a few more points:

• As I noted, these are crazy economic times to begin with. A contest like this only threatens to make things a little crazier, not only because of the bounty, but also because the contest itself involves driving. Call me silly, but anything that combines car chases and desperate consumers is probably a bad idea.
  
• I don't understand how the radio station and the dealership can be so confident that everyone who wants the car is capable of exercising self-control. Never mind the potential for vehicular violence: let's think about the listeners who actually manage to confront an innocent driver and then refuse to take "no" for an answer.
  
• I wonder how many women drivers, particularly young women who might resemble the intern much more than my wife, have been endangered by this contest. Think about it: if you're a 20-something woman driving the same kind of car, would you want absolute strangers stopping you and demanding the keys? Imagine you didn't know about the contest at all. Might you mistake an encounter like that for an attempted robbery?
  
• Surely the car dealership knew how many identical vehicles it had recently sold when cooking up this fiasco. So how come they didn't give my wife a warning? Or a chance to opt out? When the dealer and the station established this contest and released the hounds, they opted her in against her will. How about a sign or a magnet that excludes her and her vehicle?
  
• The dealership prides itself on customer service and loyalty. Perhaps, but by enlisting my wife unwillingly, by causing both of us to fear for her safety, by tacking on time to her already long commute, by making her and me worry about all of this crap in the first place, and by not responding to our repeated calls in a timely fashion, they're doing us a disservice and fomenting a lot of disloyalty. I removed the dealer's frames from around the license plates: no more free advertising from us.
  
• The disc jockeys seem especially dismissive of other drivers' concerns. They took a call, I heard, from a woman who also complained of being followed: she said that she was going to put a sign in her window stating hers was not the giveaway car. The jocks then mused on air about whether or not to instruct the intern to do the same thing, just to throw people off the scent. In other words, innocent drivers can't exclude themselves. Only complete strangers can exclude them, and only then by confronting them directly. Nice!

My wife finally got the dealership's General Manager on the phone. After some back and forth, in which he made it clear that the contest would continue, he offered her a loaner car (different in every respect) to use for the duration. An acceptable solution for us, yes, and an example of their fabled good customer service — even though it has a whiff of humoring the crazy lady. When handing over the loaner today, the GM apparently told my wife that most of the comments they've received about the promotion have been positive — one notable exception, it seems. Naturally, nothing's wrong if no one says it's wrong. And one person is really no one.

So, good for us. At least I can stop staring out the window in the evenings, wondering if my wife's been car-jacked. Let's hope nothing happens to the other drivers out there who didn't bother to make a deal, or who didn't know that they could.

vale, Zoe!

21 marzo 2009

Due settimane fa abbiamo detto adio ad una buon'amica, Zoe. Lei fu una macchina molto brava, portante spesso mia moglie al lavoro e poi a casa.

Cara Zoe, spero che i nuovi guidatori ti trattino con l'amore e la dignità!

ego, bloggax

a. d. xv Kal. Jan. ann. dom. MMVIII

nunc est bloggandum, quo modo haec pagina nominata sit.

If you've ever wondered how this blog got its name, now it can be revealed.

I started with the assumption that bloggo, bloggare means, "to blog." Of course it doesn't -- if we really wanted to render the idea of blogging into English, we'd have to resort to some kind of ponderous periphrasis like, inscribere aliquid in telam totius terrae or something equally less fun.

It's important to note that the verbal suffix -are (everyone's favorite, because the conjugation is so regular) is a factitive suffix: it often gets attached to noun stems in order to turn those nouns into verbs, which mean "to do something with [the noun]." A nota is a mark; notare literally means to do something with a mark (i.e., to make a mark, or simply to mark). nomen is a name; nominare means to do something with a name (i.e., to name, or to nominate).

Hence, bloggare should mean to do something with a blog, or to blog.

The other key element in bloggax is the -ax suffix. This is an uncommon adjective-forming suffix that gets attached to the present stem of verbs to form an adjective meaning "tending to [verb]." rapere means to sieze; rapax means tending to sieze (or rapacious). tenere means to hold; tenax means tending to hold (tenacious). loqui means to speak; loquax means tending to speak (loquacious). As you can see, -ax becomes -acious in English. This is because the genitive form of an -ax adjective contains a -c- (your Latin dictionary says: loquax, loquacis), and the genitive form often gives English its derviatives.

Note that the vowel in the -ax suffix replaces whatever stem vowel the verb brings with it: the present stem of tenere is tene-, and that final -e is long and strong. But for purposes of word formation, the -a of -ax is longer and stronger, and it wins every time. The -a- in bloggax, therefore, is really part of the suffix, not the verb itself.

Hence, bloggax should mean tending to blog (which I do tend to do, if I have the time -- and I apparently have some right now) or, if you like, blogacious.

Sharp-eyed readers will now ask themselves why I chose to use a double -g- in my root verb. That is, why not simply blogo, blogare? Answer: I did it for tha euphony, for the sake of a pleasing sound. To my ear, to which words like "blogger," "blogging," and "blogged" are more familiar than "blog" -- think about it: how often do we use this neologism in its simple form? -- bloggare is more fitting. That said, let me take a moment to praise the orthographical accuracy of the word "blogosphere."

There you have it, my mini-dissertation on bloggax. I do google the word occasionally in my moments of self-delusion, when I think I have more than one or two readers. I'm gratified that this site pops to the top of the search page (after the obligatory "Did you mean: blogger," that is), but there are two other results that catch my eye. One seems to be some Scandinavian usage I don't understand.

The other, though, comes from here: "Don't read this blog! [B]logging is a load of bloggax!"

Not what I had in mind.

fricationes

a. d. xvi Kal. Jan. ann. dom. MMVIII

illa vombatus pro sodali interrogavit quomodo "wank" Latine diceretur. tandem quaestio digna et utilis!

masturbari est nimium mediocre, si transferre verbum etymologiae dubiae sicut "wank" velis. melius est uti bonis dictis Latinis, quae delectationem sui significant. quare fricare ("rub") et tractare ("pull") optima et communiora videntur. (sic J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 208ff.)

tractare mihi placet (dico verbum, non factum!), cum transferri "yank" possit, quae translatio "wank" revocat. at hoc verbum delectationem virilem, non muliebrem, significat. quare est tractator qui se tractando, sed est tractatrix quae solum nescioquem virum delectat.

quae cum ita sint, optimae translationes pro "wank" et "wanker" sunt fricare (vel fricatio, si nomen velis) et fricator vel fricatrix. nunc haec verba ubicumque disseminanda sunt, ne meae horae investigationis pereant!

niobe

a. d. xvii Kal. Jan. ann. dom. MMVIII

volebam scribere de illa tragedia, quam mei discipuli scripserunt et novem diebus antea egerunt.

The play was called Niobe, and it told the story (made famous in Ovid, Met. 6) of the vainglorious queen of Thebes and her hubristic slight against Leto, the immortal mother of Apollo and Artemis. In Ovid's version, Apollo and Artemis get their revenge on, shooting and killing all of Niobe's fourteen children, including her youngest daughter, Meliboea. Lamenting their deaths, Niobe weeps and keeps on weeping, until she is transformed into a rock from which an everlasting spring issues forth.

My students' version followed a lesser-known variant in which Meliboea survives and, now renamed as Chloris, exiles herself from Thebes. Niobe still turns to stone, though her transformation is narrated by Artemis rather than shown on stage, in line with fifth-century Athenian convention. And prior to being petrified, Niobe is sent into exile by Zethus, the twin brother of her husband, Amphion, who also perished during the slaughter of the children. (Actually, according to the messenger speech toward the end of the play, he disembowels himself out of sheer grief: "Then his intestines, like meat to be eaten, / Cooked and hissed upon the glowing coals.")

Sounds complicated? Yes, but the play managed to explain most everything, as well it should have, since Athenian tragedies tend to be fairly self-contained. Which meant that the record 100-plus faculty and students who turned out for this production, if they knew nothing about Niobe going in, were able to follow along.

I've been requiring performances of my tragedy and comedy students as a semester project since I arrived at Skidmore — over a decade ago, now! Naturally we do our fair share of reading the plays (in English, alas), but there's nothing like having to embody the text to activate the learning experience. Also, each course counts toward the theater major, which means that there's a good chance of having budding and talented thespians on hand to lead the way. And I much prefer a performance to a final exam, the waiving of which is one of the carrots I dangle in front of my students when I announce the project on day one.

For comedy, I ask them to adapt an Aristopheanean play for a Skidmore audience — whatever that means to them. Thus they get to keep the best and dirtiest jokes, which usually attract the most attention in class, but also get deeper insight into the political dimension of Old Comedy, the aspect usually lost on them in class. (And understandably so: not many fifth-century BCE Athenian males actually take my courses.) For example, two years ago my comedy class mounted a production — if you know Aristophanes, you know that "mount" is the right word — of Sexual Congress (a.k.a. Ecclesiazusae), in which Skidmore's female students took back their school from their male counterparts. Uproarious and filthy, filthy, filthy. Picture the venerable ex-President of the college, also a classicist, in the front row crying with laughter. And me in drag.

Though the comedies have an immediate and prurient appeal, I think I prefer the tragedies. For one thing, the class has to write its own play, which means that their process from the beginning has to mirror that of an ancient tragedian: What myth do we choose? What of that myth must remain? What has to be changed? From these questions others follow: How does our audience understand what is happening? How can they tell the characters apart? What the hell are we supposed to do with the Chorus?

This semester's tragedy class played it to the hilt: masks, three actors, an involved and engaging Chorus, and an unconventional but highly public performance space: rather than use our main auditorium, they converted the stairwell outside it into their theater. I did my part, commenting on drafts of the script (I never said "no," only what was less or more likely to happen on the Athenian stage); lending ropes, boards, and clamps (might as well put our home reno arsenal to good use); putting in some appearances at rehearsals (though saying nothing); ordering chairs from Housekeeping; and making the flyer pictured here (with my students' blessing).

My colleagues said it was the best production ever, and I'm inclined to agree. I gave the whole thing a big, fat A. It was a good moment to be a professor and a reminder of why I do what I do for a living.

Now, on to next year!