Last week an “author/neuroscientist” by the name of Dan Agin had this to say in The Huffington Post. All in all, it’s an interesting comment on the changing place of books and print materials in an increasingly digital world.
My quibble is not with the gist of the article, nor indeed any part of his argument. Perhaps even worse, it comes at the concluding moment. In order to give his ending a punch, Agin decides to use a witty phrase in Latin: “Requiescant in pace, big print publishing. The run is finished.” After all, big words in a foreign language - better yet, in a ‘dead’ foreign language - are highly impressive, and most people know what RIP means even if they can’t tell you what it stands for. Dan Agin has dug up the Latin, but he still doesn’t know what it says. It’s like resurrection gone wrong.
Given his professional interests (“biological psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral genetics”, according to his short biography on The Huffington Post), we can hardly expect him to be able to conjugate Latin like he does it for a living (that’s my job, I suppose). Here’s the problem: requiescant is a verb. To be more specific, it is a third person plural present active subjunctive verb. All that may look like gibberish, but it means that the subject of the verb is plural and in the third person, namely “they”. (The “in pace” bit should come more easily: “in peace”.) So, essentially we have “they rest in peace, big print publishing”. But the subjunctive mood means that instead of “they rest in peace” (the indicative), we should say rather “let them” or “may they rest in peace”, which is the usual translation. That would be fine if we were referring to dead people (or some other “they”), but we’re not. Instead, “big print publishing” is being addressed and should be construed as the subject of the sentence. (One could argue that “books” or some other plural is the implied subject of the Latin, but there are no plural words in the last two paragraphs of the article which we can co-opt into being the subject here.) From context, then, the vocative “big print publishing” is also the subject of the verb. But that phrase is singular and so cannot take a plural verb. Moreover, the verb must be in the second person (“you”), not the third (“they”). In terms of the mood, we have a couple of options. We can issue a more direct order with the imperative: requiesce (“rest!”), though this is rather forceful. Alternatively, we can keep the jussive sense provided by the subjunctive, but we must put the verb into the second person singular: requiescas in pace (“may you rest in peace”).
I said this above, but it bears repeating: I don’t expect Dan Agin or anyone else who wants to use Latin to know or even to learn how to conjugate a dead language they only want to use here and there for rhetorical effect. (Vae, quo lingua Latina lapsa est quae olim totum orbem terrarum dominabatur!) That said, the next time you want to use big words in a foreign language, especially a ‘dead’ one, find someone who knows that language like it’s his job, and send him an email to make sure you’ve got it right. That way we grammar (and ‘dead’ foreign language) snobs can rest more easily at night.
Until then, requiescas in pace, diligentia grammaticae.
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