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September 1, 2008
Britticisms about Latin. Latin translations of Britticisms? Hmm.
My pleasure reading in my library study this week (for those moments when translating Hrotswit's Dulcitius makes me tired) is Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum, a biography of Latin. It's a quickish read and very entertaining. Luckily for my workflow I already know Latin, so I'm suffering few of the temptations to go a-whoring* with Akkadian or some such, which his Empires of the Word: a Language History of the World inspired.
Ostler is just now (p. 191) talking about litterae humaniores, the educational side of good grammatica. He says: "The Frankish chronicler Gregory of Tours, his Latin famously ropy, might well remark (around 575), 'The rhetorician philosophizing is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many.'
Ropy?
Hmm. I popped open the OED website (my complete hardback is in the office) and found these meanings for "ropy."
1. a. Forming or developing viscid, glutinous, or slimy threads; sticky and stringy.
b. transf. of the air.
c. fig. Bad, unsatisfactory, unreliable, unwell. slang and colloq.
d. Of a cow: producing ropy milk.
2. Having the form or tenacity of a rope; suggestive of a rope.
I think Ostler means 1. c. But I'm not certain. One could argue that Gregory of Tours' syntax is somewhat viscid.
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*about a-whoring. More fun Latin! So, last week I was reading the Life of Christina of Markyate. Please see this photograph for the result of all this leisure reading! I was using the C.H. Talbot translation in the handy Latin-on-the-left-page edition from Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching; zipping right along, I saw this sentence:
For lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: Thou hast destroyed all them that go a-whoring from Thee. [emphasis mine; capitalization of 2nd person pronouns, sic]Of course I check the left page to see what on earth Talbot could have construed as "a-whoring" and find:
Quia ecce qui elongant se a te peribunt: perdidisti omnes qui fornicantur abs te.
The earliest usage of "go a whoring" in the OED is from Coverdale's translation of Exodus in 1535. Fornico doesn't show up in classical Latin - or at least it doesn't show up in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, whose citations specifically exclude Christian authors. Lewis and Short give us Tertullian as the first usage. Nobody gives us enough usage to justify that abs te except understanding fornicare as a verb of motion - "to go a-whoring." I wonder on the basis of that bit of Latin if the slang predated the written English by a LONG shot! Parts of the Life of Christina of Markyate probably date to the 12th Century, her own time.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 1, 2008 3:56 PM
Comments
I've just sent an email to a Canadian, describing my grasp of a computer program as ropy. This makes me wonder whether he understood!
However, I spelt it "ropey" -- apparently incorrectly.
It's used in Australasian English as well -- a synonym of "dodgy," or "not very good" in plain English.
Posted by: Nick Thompson at September 1, 2008 6:49 PM
I'm glad you're having fun with the Latin book.
Posted by: JDT at September 2, 2008 1:25 PM
As a Brit, may I proffer that the colloquialism may derive from a similar expression "learning the ropes" with our Imperial maritime past, of sailors and sail rigging? Something ropey or something performed in a ropey fashion (for example, said of a sportsman or musician) would thus be imperfect, not to be trusted as fit for purpose, maladroit for lack of practice or skill. This is how I remember using it as a girl.
May I also draw your readers attention to a wee fetish of mine - discovering "oldest" English-ed words (ie loan words that predate the jargon of the Anglo-saxon melting pot) for example
scurrilous
can be traced back, not merely to the Vulgate, but to Etruscan vocabulary usage - it seems a truism that eternal values certainly do impinge on our cultural aesthetic when such an emotive term can be traced thus far back through the ages!
Posted by: Clare Krishan at September 9, 2008 4:25 PM