veni, vidi, vici

Dear Academics (et al.) Who Like to Make Jokes at Classicists' Expense:

I understand the urge to parody things in Latin, especially Caesar's little quip - hell, Cicero started us off in the Pro Ligario, so we can even cite ancient precedent. When done well, it can be quite funny, and I always enjoy a laugh at Caesar's (or Cicero's) expense.

What I do not appreciate is when, in your attempt to come up with a funny substitute for "vici", you end up with an actual Latin word you did not mean. Case in point.

The English is funny; the Latin is not.

Veterni is either the vocative/nominative, masculine plural or the genitive, masculine/neuter singular form of the adjective veternus, -a, -um, "old" or "ancient"; alternatively, it is the genitive form of the masculine noun veternus, -i, "old age" or "lethargy" (as brought by old age or sickness). The adjective may be used substantivally (on a completely unrelated note: why does Google not recognize that word?), but veterni, in whatever form, is not a verb. Ever. One cannot simply go around sticking an -i at the end of a recognizable stem (English or Latin) and hope that it looks like a first person singular perfect. More to the point, the joke is no longer funny if you "make up" an actual word in the language you are trying to parody.

ignaris non ignoscatur

Jon Stewart has recently called out Gretchen Carlson and Fox News for even more abhorrent behavior. He's funny enough, as usual, but there's one bit in Carlson's play-acting which he completely ignores.

Apparently, when Carlson was looking up the word "czar" (which we should expect all Stanford grads to know, I agree), she found the definition to be "king" and proceeded to use the phrase "czar-slash-king" in describing the people put in charge of banks, etc. under Bush and Obama. Clearly she (or her writer) was not looking at Merriam-Webster's or the OED or any other reputable dictionary, since "czar" ("tsar") was only considered to mean "king" in Russian before the time of Shakespeare. Had she actually gone to the OED, she would have also found that "czar" means "boss" in American English and now has a revised definition which directly applies to the sort of czars she's discussing. The use of "czar" in precisely this way seems to have been coined in 1933; somehow, I don't think Obama was around then.

Furthermore, any dictionary worth its salt lists the etymology of the word as Caesar (yes, that Caesar), who was emphatically not a king. In fact, his successors took that name as a title but always consciously spurned the term king (that's rex as in regal for Ms. Carlson). Go look up your history, or better yet, learn to read a dictionary.

And this is why we didn't go to Stanford.