Friday Morning Latin Lesson, Vol XLVIII

Salvete, mei amici! First off, I must apologize to my friend, Bev, because I was planning on playing along with her little "Show me your home office/desk" game, but for some reason my computer and my camera aren't speaking. So, I will not be able to take care of that this morning. Sorry, Bev.

Today is a special day for two reasons. Three if you count it as being payday (for those of us with the twice-a-month paycheck thing)! Mmm...sweet pecunia!

First, in case you didn't know it, today is the First Birthday of the Friday Morning Latin Lesson. Yep, it was a year ago that we all learned about bananas in our ears. It's kind of funny how something that started out silly turned into a weekly event. Thanks to Candy's suggestion, it did just that.

The whole Friday Morning Latin Lesson occurred because my supervisor wrote the line Te audire non possum... on his white board in his office, and I stared at it for a while kind of trying to figure out what it meant. From my cursory knowledge of Latin (at the time), I was able to figure out "It is not possible to hear you", and for that I felt proud.

Now? I can read simple stories in Latin and translate them. I can also fire off some short, quick translations without needing to double check my accuracy. For instance, yesterday morning, I was reading about how M. Savage's cat died, and I was able to pull feles regia (Queen Cat) up quickly. In fact, the other day, after asking my wife to clarify something, she told me that I really didn't need her any more to check my translations. I tried not to show it, but I was pretty fucking proud. I can't translate The Aeneid or anything, but I can sure tell you how to set a bag of shit on fire and leave it on someone's front porch. And what's more important than that?

Oh, and in case you were wondering (after clicking the above link, naturally), "Musa sapientum" is the Latin name for the banana tree.

The other important event for today is that this is my 600th post! For reals. It worked out really well. And, in order to keep the whole "Latin lesson" thing alive, do you know how to write 500 in Roman numerals? You do? Eff off, I'm going to show you anyway: DC, where D is 500 and the C after it adds 100 to the total for a combined 600.

This got me to thinking about other famous DCs. I came up with District of Columbia and Detective Comics. And Dick Clark, who was born about the same year Rome was sacked by the Vandals (476 AD). Admittedly, I didn't think too hard on this subject. I also thought about famous 600s, and being that I'm in North By God Carolina, I thought of the Coca-Cola 600, which is a stock car race usually held on Memorial Day weekend at Lowes Motor Speedway in Concord, NC. I also realized that I could defend Thermopylae Pass from the Persians--twice!

Also, since I'm currently sitting at 142 followers (unless something has changed by the time you read this, thus fucking up my math), that means I've written 4.22 posts for each of you. Hurry up and claim yours, otherwise you'll get stuck with some of that boring shit I wrote at the blog's inception.

Oh, and before you go saying something like "I've got a lot of reading to do!", don't. I'll admit that the early posts on here sucked, and then I went through a spate of just posting about football and basketball. So, save yourself some time and avoid those. But, if you really must read something older, start at the gall bladder surgery posts and move forward.

So, it seems that we should celebrate both of these remarkable feats with a little bit of Latin. Makes sense, being that this is the Friday Morning Latin Lesson and whatnot.

Quidquid latine dictum sit viditur altum
Pronounced: "kwid-kwid lah-teen-ay deek-toom sit weed-eat-oor awl-toom"


Translation in the hovertext!
If you think about it, that picture's pretty fucking profound. You don't agree? Well, fine.

Next, we should seriously have a party to celebrate six hundred posts. And we all know what a party needs: booze and strippers!

Demum, veniunt meretrices! Nunc, omnes inebrimur!
Pronounced: "Day-moom, way-nee-oont mair-ate-ree-case! Noonk, ohm-nays een-abe-ree-moor!"


What? I like soccer girls.

And, one more thing before I let you go for the weekend...a couple of weeks ago, when I was talking about Elvis' birthday and whatnot, I posted this in tribute to the King. At the end of the lesson, I did a little break down about how to translate the Latin phrase. Since there's been some questions tossed out about various words in the past, I thought I'd open it up to you guys: do you want me to put a little addendum at the end explaining how the phrase is translated? Check the link to the Elvis translation if you need a reference point.

In case you needed to know, meretrices means "whores". It's derived from the verb "to earn (a living)", and is related to the word "emeritus".

Edit: The Bad Yogi pointed out that I should probably not write these things at 12:30 at night, as I tend to skip over some important words...like verbs...that allow the sentences to actually make sense. I fixed that above and wrote them in bold-face, to point out the errors of my ways.