So far, I’ve received only positive opinions on the blog title – from the handful of you who have wakened sufficiently from un-dead torpor to opine. I fear that sticking with ZC will bar our representatives forever from being invited on Air Force One for private interviews and so forth, but, hey – I remain amused, and I recognize that Zombie Contentions kind of really is what we are. And it’s sort of memorable maybe. (Some might say that undead and zombies and stuff have been done to death – but how would that be an argument against it? If you think about it, it’s almost another argument for it. Cancels out at least…) Yet I still suspect that someday we may hit upon a different shingle to hang out for the world to admire and bow down before.
Now, please no one get all huffy about zombies not being the same as the living dead. I consider them species of each other and will continue to do so until some well-qualified Czombie Czar convinces me otherwise.
In other big, big blog news we now have an about page. Just a first draft. We can add to the annals as time goes by. I’ve also added a doohickey that makes it easy (and FUN, oh boy!) to quote text you’re replying to when you’re commenting.
Another doohickey reminds authors when they’ve forgotten to assign categories to their posts. I may, as Web Czar, soon also be pestering some of you to join the Okhrana become “editors” so that someone else can insert “more”‘s or add tags and categories or otherwise discipline the shambling zombie authors.
h/t to Barbara for the post title. She also did the lettering on the About Page image.
Comments 50
There’s a difference between Zombies and the Living Dead? There are people who care? Wha’?
July 16th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Colin, what you’ve accomplished in about a week is astonishing. I can barely use email and am lost in wonder at how efficiently you set this blog up and how well it works. You deserve all the credit, and I’m here to say that I will be the first to blame you, too, if this thing comes a cropper.
Speaking of which. Do you imagine that John Podhoretz might feel that the name of the blog is uncomfortably close to copyright infringement. I mean, you’d have a hard time convincing anyone that the name “just came” to you unbidden from the subconscious.
I don’t mean for a second to suggest that there is any animus at Commentary towards ZC or vice versa. I certainly don’t feel any. But I’ve pretty much confined my viewing of Contentions to the RSS feed, which means I only look in about twice a day, which is a lot fewer visits than I typically logged in the past, a whole lot. Speaking of which, I understand that the amount of click-throughs a site receives affects their ad rates and hence their revenue. Does an RSS click count as much as going to the site? I shouldn’t imagine it could.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Joe, thanks for your kind words, but, speaking as one zombie to another, it’s pretty easy when you have no life, when you’re shambling down paths previously well-shambled, and, most of all, have a readymade circle of the apparently somewhat equivalently lifeless – yet creative and voluble – to offer content.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Oh, and I’m not worried about JPod coming after us, even if there was sumthin for him to get. Makes me think of Groucho Marx’s reaction when Warner Brothers lawyers threatened to come after him for A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA:
I don’t think COMMENTNARY owns or can own “contentions.” Groucho’s letter is a hoot, btw. Well worth the click.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Colin, you’re the man. I agree with everything Joe NS said and more. As to the graphic, I just noticed for the first time (hey, I AM a zombie, after all) that the building we are lurching toward is none other than 1600 PA Ave. Listen, nothing for the prex to get huffy about. He is but the current resident, and surely not the last.
As for pestering some of us to help out in whatever capacity, I have already volunteered for duty, but consider this a re-up on my part. This is a quality endeavor, and I am proud to be a part of it.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Oh, and I forgot to mention, you captured my likeness perfectly!
July 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I can’t see any reason for caring about the feelings of anyone at contentions and am sure that Zombies needn’t fear Pod-people.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
CKM, I took the liberty of going to a free online translator for the motto you have on the “about” page (after watching so many canadian shows on HGTV I now pronounce thatword ‘aboot’).
Melior ut blog in ideologically non – congruo Abyssus , quam mutely recipero in Neoconservative Olympus
July 16th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Tried it out above, Bruce – may want to work on it a little more after I’m done laughing.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
The Latin is just dreadful.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Indeed.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Plus it should be in Greek, shouldn’t it?
Which is part of why I’m still laughing.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Greek, you say? IGoogle gives that as “Καλύτερη στο blog σε ιδεολογικά μη συμβατικές κόλαση, από mutely δεχθεί στο Neoconservative Heaven”
Can’t help but be a smart aleck. Part of my DNA.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
CK, why not simply “Zombie” or “Zombee”?
Incidentally, the Grek is worse than the Latin. “kalytere” means “prettier,” rather than “better,” and in any case is an adjective where a comparative adverb is truer to the sense. “me” could never be used proclitically as a negation; more correct would be “asymbatyike,” not asymbatikes, which doesn’t agree with the noun it modifies (kolase); “kolase,” means simply “hole”; why settle for a hole when there’s a perfectly good Greek word for “abyss,” which is, um “abyss.” And what is “sto” for goodness’ sake? It looks like the aorist of “histami,” “I stand,” but carries an inflection unknown to Greek verbs in any tense, mood, or voice.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Maybe just a short version, probably in Greek, that says “Better to blog in Hell (Hades)…” Of course, mottos are often put in Latin, and more people can make out Latin than Greek. On the other hand, that makes Greek all the more delightfully pretentious… Decisions, decisions.
Melior weblogare in abyssus… – or does abyssus need to be declined?
July 16th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Definitely. Likely, “in abysso,” but just possibly “in abyssu” if it’s a fourth-declension noun. I can’t recall which. Why not “Gehenna”? By the 3d cent. this originally Semitic word was in wide use in both Greek and Latin and was spelled the same in both (except for the alphabet used). In Greek it’s indeclinable, “Gehenna” in all cases.
Again, I’d like to suggest plain ol’ “Zombie” as a Blog title. It’s succinct and to the point and easy to remember.
July 16th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
“Better insane in hell than reserved in heaven”!
Miltonian, no?
July 16th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Y’all decide what to call it. I was thinking the motto should be “De Contentionis nil nisi bonum.”
July 16th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Um, “De Contenionibus” is the required ablative.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Mottos:
A. Abysses are cool. They just are. You look into them, and they look back, I’ve heard.
B. Gehenna, I dunno, great history and etymology lesson there, Joe, and appropriate in a way to the bizarre cultural unconscious of this blog, but Idunno sounds funny – I won’t bore you with my childish free associations.
C. Speaking of which, the reason I was asking for Greek was that Milton’s line for Satan (“better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”) alludes to and reverses Achilles in Hell: “I’d rather be a slave on earth for another man–/some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive–/than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” Doesn’t matter to anyone but me, probably – plus like I said it’s even more pretentious to have a Greek motto than a Latin one…
As for the title
A. Can’t be just “Zombie” – that would be the worst of all worlds to me – none of the pretensions, all of the undeaditude – plus people would expect either a voodoo blog or a tribute to Fela Kuti’s worst album…
B. The ideal perfect name would be clever, telling, memorable, political, serious but probably not too serious, blah, blah, blah… there was only one perfect blog name and they deleted it.
C. Before the election, as I contemplated the Obama victory I had been dreading, I imagined myself retiring to blasted isolation and solipsism, a la Kierkegaard – whose “unhappiest man” I’d sometimes associated with Barack Obama; sometimes, as we all do who read K, with myself. The Unhappiest Man is written as an address to the symparanekromenoi, the Fellowship of the Dead (one common translation), and Zombie Contentions turned out to be, in addition to a fair description of what this here blog thing is, also a kind of slant-translation of symparanekromenoi.
D. The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon
So, as you can see, I’m obviously leaning to Latin for very strong reasons. Plus having a pretentious motto sort of balances out the pop-cultural undead thing.
Melior weblogare in abysso…, does the difference in declension have to do with the activity of weblogging, or just the potential peculiarity of the word abyss?
Think hard, as these are the weightiest of matters, are they not?
July 16th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Joe NS — thanks — since it was a made-up word anyway, I went with the grammatically incorrect but more familiar ending. What we in my HS Latin class used to call Poodle Latin.
July 16th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
The retreat you pondered strikes a chord with me. Ecce Horatius:
Do you know, Bullatius
What Lebedus is?
A town more desolate
Than Gabius or Fidena
Yet there would I live
Forgetting the world
By the world forgotten
I’d gaze from the land
On Neptune’s distant rage
The Latin is as sublime. The last two verses:
oblitusque meorum, obliviscendis et illis
Neptunum . . . e terra spectare furentem
“Neptunum spectare furentem.” My hillside home sits on a hill above a Caribbean bay. Twenty odd years have passed, yet I rarely gaze at the ocean without the hypnotic image those syllables conjure overtaking me.
Neptunum furentem indeed! He’s banging about, out there in the dark, as I type.
The lines you quote (Odyssey, xi: 490ff) are of course unforgettable, though you should have included the intro: “Never . . . reconcile me to death, Odysseus ” The translation you provide is wonderful. (I sat up straight especially at “all the breathless dead” for “pasin nekuuessi kataphthimenoisin.”) Whose is it?
Anyway, I’m not the one for whom you should wonder if they matter.
I looked it up. The proper form is “in abyssu,” a simple ablative of place. If I understand your final question aright, the difference in “abyssus” and “abyssu” is grammatical, the first is the form indicating the nominative case of the fourth declension, the form for the subject of a sentence. “In abyssu” indicates the ablative, an oblique case of the same declension, sort of like a prepositional phrase in English. In the very long ago, Latin had a locative case to indicate literal position. The ablative gradually took over most of the functions of the locative, and only a few forms survived even into Classical times. For example, first-declension “Romae”, meaning “at Rome.” Come to think of it, “abyssu” sans preposition might actually BE the fourth-declension locative of “abyssus,” suggesting instead “weblogare abyssu”; q.v. “domus” ["home," fourth declension] > “domu,” the correct translation into Latin, if the Jebbies have not deceived myself, of English “at home.” It’s the semantics, of course, that matters, and it’s probably a distinction without a difference as is the case with so many Latin construes.
July 16th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
JE, you’re welcome. But really, when neologizing a good deal of freedom is allowed. You are free to choose the stem and/or the thematic vowel. If, as you did, you selected the stem “content + io,” you’re more or less obliged to use a mixed-declension inflection, i.e. “-ibus.” If instead, to draw the attention to a parallel with “mortuis,” you’re welcome to neologize on the past participle “content + us,” you would have been parodically licensed to use the masculine declension to form “contentuis.” Is that poodle or pig Latin? I give up.
Note to CK: Greek isn’t always pretentious. You do recall the drollery of the fraternity Masta Beta Kau, don’t you?
July 16th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
OK, my one and only suggestion for a blog name:
Cominsky Field
July 16th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
And yes, I know the spelling of “Comiskey.”
July 16th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Joe — either “contentuis” or “contentionibus” is a Didactic Latin neologism. I’m off playing a different game. We called it Poodle Latin to distinguish it precisely as a method of vulgar, non-didactic popular neologizing. The implication was that that’s a fluffy, French-Poodle-tropish thing to do.
What can I say, we were in high school…
July 16th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I’m using “pretentious” as a positive here, Joe – but I think a Latin motto that makes a verb out of “to weblog” and alludes incomprehensibly via Zombie logic to Milton and Homer is by far and away pretentious enough. Your feelings about the proper word order are also welcome… And couldn’t/wouldn’t the “melior” be simplly dropped in a comparative statement of this type, since “better” is already implied by the “quam” – just my sense of the typical economy of proverbial Latin?
So…
Melior weblogare abyssu…
or maybe
Weblogare abyssu melior…
or maybe
the full motto… without the qualifiers… you wanna try that for us?
The Horatius is just great. Thank for sharing it – the Latin, too. I’d say more but it would turn into a weepy blog-drunken, I love ya man, I love you all, sniff, sniff, kind of thing.
The Achilles apparently comes from the Robert Fagles translation. The breathless dead is another good description for present company – not literally, of course, at least I hope, but virtually.
JED I’m beginning to think may have a carefully concealed evil streak. Cominskey Field!
July 16th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
CK…I liked “Zombie” right from the start but I’ve got to admit that Comiskey, er Cominsky Park, is suitably clever.
Steven from Indiana
July 16th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
CK, a few observations.
1) eliminating “melior” is brilliant! Doing so, in my opinion, imparts a Martialian aphoristic piquancy to the line such as one finds in the “Epigrams.”
2) Because Latin “v” was almost certainly prounounced like English “w,” although the Jebbies, committed, you might to say, to Church Latin, would die of shame to read a former student suggesting it, “weblogare” could be spelled “veblogare.” (In certain contexts one encounters “ou” substituted for “v” to elicit the proper phonetics, but I wouldn’t recommend it here.)
3) The main irritant to euphony, of course, is that “web” is Anglo-Saxon in origin and both ear and eye recognize it immediately, which could suggest replacing it with some variant of “textus [L. "web"].” The meaning of “textologare” or, arguably, “texologare,” however, would be lost on a casual reader, I suspect. “Logare” presents no difficulty, “log” being a Greek root long naturalized in Latin. I suggest dropping “web” entirely and go with “blogare” or “blogere”; shifting the conjugation would also shift the stress to the antepenult (“blog,” and see below).
4) The verb in the comparative clause needs careful selection. “Recipere,” meaning to “to receive,” is too bland, I think. If bawdiness is not out of bounds, then “rapiri,” literally “to be seized,” but figuratively “raped,” might do. The stress also falls on the antepenult, so that’s helpful. There’s also laying around somewhere a Latin verb meaning to “play the punk” – I imagine you know what “punk” originally meant – something like “catamitere.” I’d have to dig around a bit in some dusty lexicon to be sure, but the infinitive would not scan at all well.
5) Memory has lifted her skirts a bit, and I now seem to recall that Greek masculines like “abyssos” and “Olympos” were routinely slotted into the fourth declension when imported into Latin, which would suggest “Olympu” in parallel construction with “abyssu.”
So then, you might settle on:
“blogere abyssu quam rapiri Olympu”
or
“Abyssu blogere quam rapiri Olympu.”
Details, details, a fool’s paradise.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:05 am
CK, a couple of additional points worth making so that you will be in no doubt as to how the motto SHOULD be pronounced:
1) Long-settled rules of accidence for pronouncing Greek primitives in Latin require – because the “y” in “abyssos” and “Olympos” is almost certainly short – the stress must fall in Latin on the antepenult, and there’s no appeal from it, namely on the “a” and on the “O.” In sum, the meter is more dactylic than iambic.
2) Greek has two different characters for “O,” omicron for short “O,” as in English “got,” and omega for long, as in “tote.” The “O” in Olympus is an omicron in Greek and should be sounded like (ah) rather than “oh,” that it is pronounce long in English notwithstanding.
3) Finally, by employing blog in the third conjugation (blogere) rather than the first (blogare), there is some small risk that the “g,” more likely than not, will be pronounced soft as in English “gel” rather than hard as in “blog.” That’s probably just my Church Latin bias interfering, but you might want to consider it. I still maintain that, if “rapiri” is used, “blogere” scans much better. Chacun a son gout!
July 17th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Steven from Indiana — I believe our President has established that it is “Cominsky FIELD.”
It has probably been “Wrigley Park” all along, and Chicagoans have just been in error for decades.
I like the -sky, BTW, as it adds a Bolshevist air to the whole thing. The -skey ending comes off like the coinage was percolated through George Bernard Shaw first, or something.
And for Joe NS, I meant to add that of course, Didactic Latin neologisms are the best ones, and the objective we should all be striving for, Latin-neologism-wise.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:44 am
OK – how about this one:
abyssu blogere quam olympu rapiri
approximately: in the abyss to blog rather than on Olympus to be uh seized.
very heroic it seems to me – if just a tad lurid – hey’s it’s 2009! I dropped the capital O cuz it strikes me that the orthography is modern and makes for an uglier text. I liked the internal symmetry – anything wrong with it grammatically? Or does it start sounding too Italian to go for such decoration? We wouldn’t want Victor Davis Hanson to stalk off in a huff…
Last, I know I said abysses were cool, but if there are original Latin words approximately equaling abyssos and olympos, then the symparenekromenoi may wish to take them under consideration.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:53 am
or maybe
cominsky blogere quam olympu rapiri
I’m presuming that Joe knows the proper declension for non-existent baseball fields.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:57 am
CK, no difficulty with lower-case “O.” In Latin and Greek everything was upper case; lower casing seems to have begun in Late Antiquity (c. 5th-6th cent.), which only suggests that the casing selected is unimportant.
But hold the phone!
There is, drat, a new wrinkle. I have newly learned that the verb “rapio” is NOT a fourth- conjugation verb but what, in fact, is what I was taught to be a third-conjugation “i-o” verb. Hence, the present infinitive is definitely “rapere” and not “rapire” as I clumsily assumed. Why does this matter? (A question that obviously will not bear close scrutiny since the entire discussion is de novo flat ridiculous.) Because the formation of the passive infinitive of third-conjugation verbs differs, I SEEM to recall, from that for fourth-conjugation verbs. Thus, rapiri, not to put too fine a point on it, may be wrong. The correct form might be raperi, not a problem, and even, ugh, “rapi,” a huge problem prosodically speaking, with the stress falling on the ultima, for pity’s sake, as in, for instance, “rupee,” murtilizing the meter to smithereens. (“Murtilize,” you will appreciate, is one of those remarkable verbs that cannot be found in any dictionary on earth yet is nonetheless indispensable for an adequate description of certain predicaments that life presents to the average eleven-year-old boy.)
Long and short? I will have to look into the matter, but, as I’m fresh out of vodka and lack the intestinal fortitude to excavate further till the decanter is replenished, final disposition may be may be some time acoming. In the meantime I suggest you contact your broker and short Zombie Contentions just to be safe.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Phew – feeling like we may have dodged a bullet here, Joe. I agree that “rapi” like rupee… well there aren’t words for it. I’d urge you in your further investigations also to consider less violent verbs, perhaps returning the emphasis to the passive and suborn, perhaps impoverished or disenfranchised, but not ravished or violated, status of a former commenter turned into a mere reader or browser.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Aye-aye!
July 17th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Che stadium, anyone?
July 17th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
How about being “ignored” in Olympus rather than “having your ass kicked” in Olympus?
Or start a whole new vector to this thread by Latinizing “dissed.”
July 17th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Sound the tocsin! Strike the colors! Pipe the Aeolian dirge and the “Lament of the Clan McCleod Widows.”
Like the great god Thammuz, poor “raperi” is no more.
Ugly little “rapi” it is and only can be.
“Break! Break! Break! on thy cold gray rocks oh – ”
Oh the hell with it, is what it is. Back to the draw’n’ board.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
CK, Two candidates for your delectation:
1) desolare: present passive infinitive “desolari,” to be “foresaken,” “abandoned,” or, figuratively “dumped.”
2) dissimulare: pr. pass. inf. “dissimulari,” to be “ignored.”
If, as you once indicated, you might prefer all-Latin roots, then, for “hell,” there’s the virgilian “Avernus,” and for “heaven,” use “coelum.”
As to the case, let’s put it this way, use the ablatives “in Averno/in coelo” if what is primarily meant is that “we” are “IN hell/heaven,” but use the locatives “Averni/coeli” if, rather the meaning is more “in HELL/in HEAVEN.”
Thus, remembering that the initial and final words of a sentence in any language, but especially in Latin, carry semantical emphasis, we have:
“in averno blogere quam desolari in coelo”
or, as I recommend,
“averni blogere quam desolari coeli”
(“dissimulari” mutatis mutandis).
“Avernus” is a proper noun. Capitalization is an executive decision, however, and above my rating.
A few other minor points, the “coe-” in coelum” is pronounced either like “kay” or like “chay.” The latter is more common, e.g., it’s pronounced that way in Italian; the latter is more correct philologically.
It would be way cool if, when composing the motto, you used the ligature form of “oe.” You know, a font that compresses the two letters into a single character?
I’ve sent the invoice to the usual address. Noli trahere pedes vostros. Okay?
July 18th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Erratum: paragraph 11 obviously should be “the FORMER is more correct philolgically”
July 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I’m gunna try it
averni blogere quam dissimulari coeli
and see if i can get the right “character” for coeli – I’d also like it in italics, which will require some further futzing.
As I understand it from my quick research, Avernus would be kind of a synecdoche, referring to a real geographical location seen as the mouth of the underworld, which would be particularly appropriate for a blog (mouth). I wonder, however, what the pre-Virgilian expression for the “underworld” itself would be? Was it at all infernal? Should we consider some Catholic/Dantesque transposition?
Though desolari rolls off the tongue more easily, I like the resonance of “dissimulari” with “dissimulate,” even though as I understand it the expression would translate as “to be dissimulated,” a notion that I for one have never encountered in any English language discourse.
As I read the motto aloud, the five syllables of dissimulari create a kind of a peaked internal emphasis of their own – as though the speaker is spelling his disgust and defiance for the god… You get the irony? The very act of pointing out that one has been dissimulated is paradoxical: To the extent you hear of my displeasure at being ignored, you are failing in your effort to ignore me. So there, Podhoretz!
Zomboid gratitude in excelsis, Joe! If you have any further inspirations or corrections, don’t hesitate! These things aren’t really carved in stone…
July 18th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Okey-dokey, but be aware that “dissimulare” has an implied sense of pretense, i.e., “[pretending] not to know.”
Other verbs I considered were “neglegere,” pass. inf. “neglegi,” with stress on the first syllable (parallel with blogere), which has the sense of “[determined] not to know,” and “pratermiittere/praetermitti,” with the implication of “overlook,” not what we’re getting at, I think, and in any event a ridiculous word as well as metrically infelicitous. All, however, have citations in which they mean “ignore” in some sense or the other.
You’re of course correct that Avernus might more accurately be translated as “Hellmouth.” The early Romans seemed to have no clear idea, religious or otherwise, of a place of punishment after death. Avernus is clearly Vergil’s literary invention and is modeled after Homer. Remember, Odysseus scarcely ventures past Hades’ front door in “The Odyssey.”
One does encounter, usually poetically, the plural noun “inferi,” meaning the “lower [worlds],” in texts that are much older than “The Aeneid.” The correct form would be “inferis.”
July 18th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Oh yes, how could I forget “ignorare/lgnorari”
I ignored, as it were, this obvious choice because it has the definite meaning “not to know,” or “to be [unintentially] unaware of” rather than deliberately not noticing. That didn’t seem to fit, but you might think different.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Hmmmm….
inferis blogere quam dissimulari coeli.
Correct? I like it. Partly because inferis obviously suggests “inferior” in the process of hurling defiance back at our superiors. Even though I also like the Hellmouth. My rule on showing off your Latin to non-Latinists is to sprinkle as many cognates as possible in your show-off text.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Okay, but there is something, je ne sais quoi, about the root meaning of “dissimulare” that does not travel well from active to passive voice in my opinion. If you look at the Latin root, similis, you note at once that the original meaning, expressed affirmatively as a verb, “similare,” must have been to “liken” or “compare.” The prefix “dis-” in Latin is derived from “duo” = “two,” and its basal meaning, first and reasonably enough, has to do with “separateness” or “not one thing” and then, by a sort of metonymy, with “opposition” or “extreme separation”; and so you can readily grasp, I think, why “dis” could have come to connote a species of negation.
When “dis” is prefixed to “similare” one gets, eventually, “dissimulare,” with the immediate sense, per supram, of “not to [see] what the thing is like” and, by almost insensible semantic gradations, “to fail to see the thing [at all],” and thus one comes “to ignore the thing.” And all of the above “not likening” and “not seeing” is more or less deliberate, which is why the commonest use of the verb in Latin is not “to ignore” but “to disguise.” Don’t misunderstand, the sense of “pretend to ignore” is well-attested in the Latin, but how a sense of pretense originally vested in the subject of an active verb may continue to lodge in the subject in the passive voice, where subject and object have reversed grammatical roles, as it were, is quite mysterious.
I imagine that, oh, about six or seven sentences ago, the though “How did I get into THIS mess?” may have crossed your mind.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
oddly enough, or maybe inevitably (often the same thing, no?), your argument against affects me as an argument for. When VDH professes not to understand why we care about being disguised, we’ll put him in contact with you for revisions, I think.
OK – well, how about this: “Better to blog in Hell, than to remain invisible in Heaven.” Or “to be silenced,” to “remain silenced,” to accept having been rendered mute – you catch my drift? There’s probably some awful sexist version of what I’m driving at: “Better to be a blogging satyr in Hell than a mute eunuch in Heaven.” There’s a Byzantine Greek word for the kind of eunuch who lacked not just testicles, but male member as well. But don’t know that I’d like you to try to work that in.
The point is that the condition we reject is that of passive, silent inferior. If you can convey that better than with dissimulari, hit me!
July 18th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Let me try again – what I take from “dissimulari” is the imputation that the evil Contentions overlords, acting like all of our urban intellectual academic betters, are pretending that we don’t exist – they’re dissimulating, as though they never knew that a gallery of interested individuals were ready to pounce on their thoughts, and through a very American intellectual rough-and-tumble, put them to the test, sometimes arrive at new or better thoughts. In this sense, the Contentions people, rather than embrace the spirit of the age – the cybernetic Army of Davids – are hiding from it, writing as though unaware of the challenges we once upon a time were putting to them continually, post by post.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I doubt that I can or that it’s worth trying. If you don’t hear from me real soon, and no one else objects, go with what you like.
Sometimes though, I feel like like using:
uckfay ouyay
and leave it that.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
More: We’ve been disassembled by these dissemblers – but here we assemble under this new semblance. Hah!
July 18th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
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