Time Flies

I should be packing to return to New York, but fog is drifting by the windows, so I am reading the September issue of a Canadian literary magazine that a friend down the road brought over, because it has two stories with tangential Latin connections. I also found in its pages an advertisement for an ebook containing twenty-three years' worth of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards. As you can see on the website, these awards have a crest of two lions rampant around a torch with a Latin motto encircling: ARTES NOS TENENT ET INSPIRANT (The arts hold and inspire us). Here is an explanation of the crest.

One of the two stories of Latin interest was a look into flying around Canada with a fragile copy of Magna Carta, reminding us again that 2015 is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Great Charter at Runnymede. Most fascinating was the necessity of proper humidity around the document; the iron-based ink could in fact disappear under the wrong conditions. The other story was about decoding Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, especially the identity in nineteenth-century England of the Cheshire Cat, wordplay abounding. A disappearing cat, disappearing ink, a disappearing landscape--disappearing summer!

Poetic Energy

The headline reads "Pieridae gets export approval: Company says it will make final investment decision on Goldboro LNG project in 2016" on p. B2 of the Business section of the 18 August edition of the Halifax Chronicle Herald.  Pieridae Energy (Canada) Ltd. is a company that deals in liquefied natural gas (LNG); I wonder if the namers of the company were looking for a beautiful image that had some connection with burning/energy. For their website they chose a lovely photograph of one of the many (over a thousand) species of Pieridae and created a logo that also suggests a butterfly. The family of Pieridae includes the butterflies known as sulfurs, the common pests of cruciferous vegetables like cabbages and broccoli. Sulfur is a smell associated with burning...perhaps it is a stretch. The ultimate root of Pieridae seems to be Pieria, a region of Macedonia that is home to Mount Olympus and also dear to the Muses, goddesses of poetic inspiration.

Dashing Through the Media

I cannot report or comment on a television/media family whose last name begins with the letter K. But I did note an Associated Press article discussing possible K-fatigue in today’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald:

Tom Nunan, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television with a long resume in film and TV entertainment, doesn't think so. He has a two-word explanation for the world's prolonged Kardashian-Jenner moment. It's "sui generis," or Latin for don't hold your breath.

Not really. What it means is this moment is unique, in a class of its own.

"It's so vast," he said Wednesday by phone from Los Angeles. "Because there are so many members of this clan, our attention can bounce from one to the next to the next to the next."

What sui generis really means is “of its own kind,” usually understood as a synonym for “unique,” an adjective rooted in the Latin adjective unus, a, um meaning “one.” 

I cannot comment on anything related to this family, but I do appreciate Tom Nunan’s observations. I marvel that teachers, commentators, columnists, reporters continue to seek Latin words and phrases to explain modern media phenomena.

P.S. Media is a plural Latin word, as phenomena is a plural Greek word. One medium is one mode of news (internet, newspaper, radio, etc.) and one phenomenon is one appearance of something.

Latin, Latin Everywhere?

In an article in today's Halifax Chronicle-Herald, a Canadian reporter used three Latin words and phrases. What was the subject of the article? The larger-than-life Donald Trump! Here are the relevant sentences:

"That value system doesn't abide turning the other cheek. Rather, it responds to every ounce of criticism with a multi-tonne, Mack truck of ad-hominem degradation."

"His current political targets, John McCain, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina, and Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, will recognize the modus operandi spelled out in that old book chapter."

"His aversion to forgiveness is deeply ingrained. His words in a 25-year-old interview... are a near-verbatim replica of what he's told political talk shows in recent days."

Ad-hominem here is a Latin prepositional phrase turned into an adjective; the prepositional phrase means "to/towards a human" and describes a rhetorical attack directed to a person rather than to an argument.

Modus operandi is a Latin noun phrase meaning "method of working or of operating."

Verbatim is a Latin adverb meaning "word by word."

Interestingly all three of these words were not italicized in the context of the article; these Latin words have become English words!

Darkness Underwater

Yesterday I went to the local Canada Post office in Riverport, Nova Scotia to buy stamps for mail destined for the United States ($1.20 CDN + 15% tax each). I was disappointed to find no new commemoratives for international delivery, but I was pleased to find a Latin word on a new domestic issue to commemorate the H.M.S. Erebus, a ship that sank in 1848 on the Franklin expedition to find a Northwest Passage across northern Canada. The ship was discovered again last fall; you can learn more about the ship and the stamp itself here. The name Erebus is a Latinized form of the Greek Erebos (meaning “darkness”) considered in early mythology to be an offspring of Chaos, the primordial state of confusion. What a strange name for a ship! It reminds me of the (fictional) French ship, the Acheron, in the film Master and Commander (2003)) based on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels; Acheron is one of the five mythological rivers, the river of pain, in the ancient Greek underworld.

Darkness and pain—no happy ending for either of these ships. A famous Nova Scotian folksinger, Stan Rogers (1949-1983), wrote a song about the Franklin expedition on which the Erebus was lost:

You Say Aquapel, I Say Rain-X

Today as my husband and I sat at Frank's Automotive while Frank ran computer codes for some illuminated dashboard warning lights, I amused myself by scanning magazines and product shelves for Latin connections. Neither disappointed! First the shelves: I spied a product near the windshield wiper blades called Aquapel, and knew immediately what it was. The Latin noun aqua, ae f. means "water," and the Latin verb pello, pellere, pepuli, pulsum means "I drive," so the trade name Aquapel means "driving back water," an excellent name for a product that repels (drives back) water from your car windshield. While I was unfamiliar with Aquapel, I have used a competing product called Rain-X, another good name also with a Latin connection. The X part of the name is a shortened form of the Latin preposition ex meaning "out," so the Rain-X name means "Rain out," as in "Get out of here, rain!" Which product is better? Judge for yourself by checking the Grudge Match posting on the Aquapel website.

Look for the magazine find tomorrow!

They Seek Him Here

Do you recognize that title statement? The whole verse:

"They seek him here, they seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That demned elusive Pimpernel!"

I was reminded of this quotation as I was ski-walking around the yard yesterday, observing the natural beauty of this maritime location, because I spied at first one and then a whole plot of a tiny reddish flower called...the scarlet pimpernel, anagallis arvensis! The Latin genus name Anagallis seems to mean "laughter," and arvensis is an adjective meaning "of the ploughed land."

The Scarlet Pimpernel, a novel by Baroness Orczy, from which the quote above comes, was a favorite classic novel about intrigue during the French Revolution. An English noble is known only by his seal, a small flower, as he rescues French nobles from the guillotine. Several film versions exist; my favorite was made in 1934, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. In one scene Merle Oberon is inspecting a portrait in the library when she observes a tiny scarlet pimpernel in the corner, and she has a sudden key insight. I always thought that a scarlet pimpernel was a made-up literary plant, but after reading my neighbor's reference book on weeds of Nova Scotia, I was delighted to learn that these little flowers grow wildly and abundantly around the world, including here in my backyard.