I think it was Patterico’s Pontifications where I recently ran across a weblog called Verum Serum. An interesting name, since it has three or four meanings in Latin:

1. True Whey (taking Verum as an adjective and Serum as a noun). I thought the second word meant ‘gravy’, but apparently not, at least in classical Latin. Which is too bad: “True Gravy” might almost work as a website name, but not “True Whey”.
2. Late Truth (taking Verum as a noun and Serum as an adjective). Alternatively, this could mean “Too Late Truth” or “The Truth Too Late”, since the adjective has both meanings.
3. Truth of the Chinese (taking both words as nouns, with Serum genitive plural). Just to be pedantic, “Chinese” here is plural, so perhaps “Truth of the Chinese people”. (Hmmm. That’s not clearly plural, either, since “people” may be a singular meaning “nation” or a plural meaning “persons, humans”. English is a tricky language.)

So which of these interesting possibilities is the right one? None, as it turns out: it’s only half Latin. As the proprietors say on their ‘About’ page, “Verum is Latin for truth, as in truth serum. Why Latin? Because we’re tired of the Catholic blogs hogging all the cool names.”

In its article on Leibniz, Wikipedia reports: “No philosopher has ever had as much experience with practical affairs of state as Leibniz, except possibly Marcus Aurelius.” Possibly? Privy Counselor of Justice to the House of Brunswick, trusted adviser to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia, and Imperial Court Counselor to the Habsburgs are important positions, beyond the reach of most philosophers, but they hardly compare to being Emperor of Rome.

One of the recurring minor characters in Brave New World is Benito Hoover. Somehow that name reminds me of a prominent contemporary politician. If I could only think who . . . .

The Perseus Collection of Greek and Roman Materials provides a convenient list of Word Counts by Language. As of half an hour ago, the totals were:

English
(42,956,587 words)
French
(2,001 words)
German
(426,929 words)
Greek
(8,263,757 words)
Italian
(178 words)
Latin
(9,244,457 words)
Old English
(1 word)
Other
(3,318 words)

I want to know how a single word of Old English slipped in among the tens of millions in other languages, why it isn’t listed among the ‘Other’ languages, and — most important — what word is it?

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell twice quotes a song popular among the proles of his imagined future, “composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator”. He calls it “dreadful rubbish” and a “driveling song”, but it seems to me that it would fit right in to the Great American Songbook. Of course, we cannot judge the music, but I have certainly heard worse words. Here are the lyrics, with the proletarian (Cockney) mispronunciations edited out:

It was only a hopeless fancy,
It passed like an April day,
But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
They have stolen my heart away!

They say that time heals all things,
They say you can always forget;
But the smiles and the tears across the years
They twist my heartstrings yet!

(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.iv and II.x)

It is not deep, but other than the awkward rhythm of the fifth line, I don’t see anything embarrassingly wrong with it. Do I need a taste-bud transplant?

I have gotten comments working for the first time in months. That should make blogging more fun, and therefore more frequent. Watch this space. (Comments are moderated, so don’t expect them to appear instantly.)

As of 6:00 pm Eastern time yesterday, we are one-tenth of the way through the Obama administration — one-twentieth if he manages to get himself reelected, though that seems less likely with every passing day.

An English English professor — I mean an Englishman who is also a professor of English — mocks the hard sciences to a mathematician:

A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars — big bangs, black holes — who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.

(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Scene 5)

I’ve seen the phrase (without the question mark) all over the place this weekend, but the first word seems wrong. Not that I think Memorial Day should be unhappy, but solemn, respectful, reflective, thoughtful, or contemplative would all be better adjectives than happy.

Absinthe, of course, which recently appeared at the state liquor store down the hill. They have four different brands, all priced from $42.95 to $59.95, so I need to do a bit of research before trying one out. Not to mention stocking up on sugar cubes.

I know very little about meteorology, but tomorrow’s National Weather Service forecast for my town includes what must be a quite unusual combination: “Patchy frost / Hi: 70^o F”.

InstaPundit writes that if Obama takes Nick Gillespie’s advice to legalize and tax drugs, gambling, and prostitution, “it’ll be your patriotic duty to smoke dope and sleep with hookers”. My knowledge of hookers is purely theoretical, but surely if you’re actually sleeping with them you’re wasting your money?

Emily Dickinson at her coldest and clearest:

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

It should be known that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself mostly with prepositions, adverbs, and finally, such particles as have decidedly no meaning. If the matter was very difficult, he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, so that very often he would begin his speech with the words “That, really, is altogether sort of . . .” after which would come nothing, and he himself would forget it, thinking everything had been said.

A few pages later:

“So it’s that, that’s what it is,” he said to himself, “I really didn’t think it would come out sort of . . .” and then, after some silence, he added, “So that’s how it is! that’s what finally comes out! and I really never would have supposed it would be so.” Following that, a long silence again ensued, after which he said, “So that’s it! Such an, indeed, altogether unexpected, sort of . . . it’s altogether . . . such a circumstance!”

(Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”, 1842)

I bought the very handsome Everyman Collected Tales, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, last Sunday at Daedalus Books in Maryland, and haven’t had time to read more than the one story. (Grades were due Tuesday, and I have an indexing job to finish by Monday, so I haven’t had much time for anything else.) Here are a few desultory notes, so my April archives won’t be quite so bare:

1. I’m probably not the first to notice a superficial and (I assume) coincidental resemblance between the anti-hero of “The Overcoat” and Bartleby the Scrivener: they come to rather different ends, but spend their days copying documents and seem to have no other life.
2. I wonder how many readers will feel compelled to look up the linguistic meaning of ‘particle’, which I have never run across except in scholarly treatments of ancient grammar such as Solodow’s The Latin Particle ‘Quidem’ or Denniston’s magisterial The Greek Particles. (I also sometimes wonder how many casual browsers have thought that the latter was a physics text.)
3. None of the blogs I read have mentioned that April 1st was Gogol’s 200th birthday. Perhaps I need to read more literary blogs, particularly since politics and economics are none too cheery subjects these days.

Most depressing things I’ve seen or heard in the last two weeks:

1. The policeman who pulled me over for speeding last Tuesday asked me about my driving record and I told him, quite truthfully, that I’ve had four moving violations in nearly forty years of driving, the most recent a speeding ticket in another county last August. He said that not having had a ticket for eight whole months made me an excellent driver, and let me go with a warning. Apparently a significant percentage of local drivers get several tickets a year, which explains a lot about my insurance rates. I’ve had one ticket each in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, so I suppose I should be worried that the ’10s will arrive fairly soon.

2. The next evening, one of the actors at the play I was seeing (Comedy of Errors here) asked if that was me he’d seen pulled over by a police car. Thanks for noticing, funny man.

3. A week or so before, a fellow theater-goer asked me about the Loeb Classical Text I was reading at intermission and whether I teach Latin (yes) or Greek (if there’s any demand). We talked about teaching and learning for a good five minutes before realizing that if we were in the same grad department at the same time, we really should know each other. We knew each other’s names, but less than twenty years had changed both our faces beyond recognition.

4. My students sometimes offer unsolicited dating advice, which I can generally squelch by saying that I don’t really think dating advice from teenagers is very helpful to someone my age. Before I could do so last week, one of my 11th-graders offered to set me up on a date . . . with her grandmother. To make it worse, she seems to have been serious, and well-intentioned.

Belmont Club links to a London Times story about the top ‘green’ adviser of Gordon Brown who wants to cut the population of the U.K. in half. He quotes a comment on the Times story which spells out some implications: “Just in case no one noticed, the article did not say that ’slowing growth’ was necessary. It said that ‘cutting the population’ was the necessity. So I ask this: Who goes and who decides? Is emigration an option, or is a more permanent solution to be recommended?”

As I write, 62 comments have appeared on the Belmont Club story, but none asks the obvious follow-up question: Wouldn’t a more concise synonym for “more permanent solution” be “final solution”? I don’t know whether “Bill, San Francisco, USA”, the author of the phrase, slipped in the historical allusion consciously or unconsciously, but it seems thoroughly appropriate. If he meant to make the insinuation I have spelled out here, but wrote it Aesopically to avoid censorship, all I can say is: “Message received. Well done.”

An incompetent small-town Australian police chief (Royle) visits the lodgings of a headmaster suspected of murder (Doncaster):

“It was a gentleman-scholar’s room: photographs of cricket teams, school groups, and a smart army photograph with a rather artificially grim expression. On the wall a college shield, and a cricket bat signed by one of the school’s dimmest past students, who had gone on to play for the state and become a Country Party politician. The bookshelves were full of books, old, dirty, and looking very thumbed. Royle idly wondered whether the thumbs that had thumbed them had been Doncaster’s thumbs, or if they had been picked up cheap in a second-hand bookshop. He’d never actually seen Doncaster reading, and unless he actually saw people reading, Royle was inclined to suspect that they never did, since he had no time whatsoever for the occupation himself.”

(Robert Barnard, Death of an Old Goat, 1979, XI)

I don’t expect anyone except John Weidner and Orrin Judd to agree with me, but I want to put this on record, so I can gloat if it comes true:

If President Obama does not pull himself together and start acting like a president very soon — and I doubt that he is capable of it — retroactive admiration for the decency and (relative) competence of George W. Bush may spread so far and fast that Jeb Bush will have a real chance to be nominated and elected president in 2012. In what will surely be a crowded field, I would not put his chances of winning the nomination higher than 5% or 6%, but that’s up from .001% in 2008, when it would have taken a meteor shower wiping out all the other candidates to outweigh pandemic Bush fatigue. I do think that whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2012 has at least a 75% chance of winning the election, and that Bush fatigue and even Bush hatred may (note: may) melt away, leaving only a slight, though extraordinarily foul, odor, like a very small piece of Limburger, or the spot on the road where a dead skunk lay before the highway department or a helpful vulture dragged it away.

“I had made the discovery that if you put people in a comic light they became more likable — if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got along much better with him thereafter, partly because you were aware that you were the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 152)

The text puts the comma before ‘thereafter’, but that can’t be right, can it?

“. . . a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 95)

Inelegantly expressed, but the thought is interesting.