Princeton professor Alexander Nehamas has just posted an interesting bit about censorship on The New York Times’ website in which he compares our attempts to censor parts of modern popular culture we fear - but ultimately can’t prove - corrupt our youth (e.g. violent video games) with Plato’s criticism of ancient popular culture (specifically works by Homer and the tragic dramatists) and its consequentially minimal role in his ideal republic. Ignore the repulsive copy-editing, or lack thereof; Nehamas might have a point.

humanae hostiae

Dr. Krugman’s latest piece in The New York Times may be a poetic and persuasive diatribe against the “policy elite” and the “responsible economic policy” they set, but it has also made me want to put him in a new level of Dante’s Inferno, one reserved for those who have offended the classics gods and us who follow them.

His article, “Appeasing the Bond Gods,” begins as follows:

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite -- central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue -- are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

It’s the end of the last sentence that gets me. While poetic, as I said, and over the top, as he said, the predicate implies that priests of ancient cults (“some” here being quidlibet, “whichever” or “any you please”) generally “demanded that we engage in human sacrifices.” As someone who has studied some of those “ancient cults” and has a professional interest in interesting others in them, I do not appreciate Krugman’s implication, intended or otherwise. Certain cults at certain times in certain places may have included human sacrifice as a regular practice, but that does not seem to have been accepted practice among the majority of cults in the Greco-Roman world - among which may be mentioned one famous cult in particular (hint: it revolved around a figure with the initials J.C. who was not Julius Caesar). Although non-classical cults have become and continue to be popular, a significant percentage of Krugman’s readers will no doubt associate “ancient cult” with the Greco-Roman world and therefore draw the conclusion that human sacrifice was commonplace there. I’m only sorry that such a respected and widely read economist can be held responsible for that assumption.

vae ignoratis!

This article just came out in today’s issue of Time Magazine. I won’t bicker with absolutely everything the author has to say, although I probably could. Instead, I’d just like to point out that Ramesh Ponnuru seems to censure the value placed on education beyond the arguably flawed K-12 system, and the various ensuing payoffs, much more than the often astronomical prices of higher education in this country. (Make what you will of the fact that we hold very different opinions, despite having graduated from the same university with the same honors in similar fields.)

It may be true that 40% of those who matriculate do not graduate from college within six years, but there are many varied factors that contribute to this statistic: some spend their nights partying and their days hungover, which happens at institutions of all tiers; others may actually not be “cut out” for the experience of post-secondary education; but the majority probably just can’t handle more debt than they already have. And while the author acknowledges that the purpose of higher education is not to secure jobs for its students, though any decent institution prepares them to find such work as is available upon graduation, “traditional college” is still blamed here for producing not much more than debt.

diligentia grammaticae

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.

fur fulminis

The Lightning Thief

I freely admit that I spent far more time laughing at this movie than laughing with what few laugh-out-loud moments it had. With that said, if you’re a fan of the movie, you might want to stop reading now. I also admit that I haven’t read the (whole) book; it turned me off like a faucet before the end of the first chapter. As a result, I’m not quite sure which of the things I discuss here are found only in the movie and which are more or less faithfully adapted from the book. I also don’t particularly care, since I think my comments should stand regardless.

Warning: contains spoilers.

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.