{"id":109,"date":"2005-10-20T23:50:53","date_gmt":"2005-10-21T03:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=109"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:14:25","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:14:25","slug":"never-send-a-machine-to-do-a-mans-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=109","title":{"rendered":"Never Send A Machine To Do A Man&#8217;s Job"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lileks.com\/bleats\/archive\/05\/1005\/102005.html\">Lileks<\/a> finds some coded Latin, but concludes that it must be gibberish, since the online Latin translator couldn&#8217;t handle it. That just shows how stupid machines are. It is not quite classical Latin, but close enough to have a meaning. Lileks&#8217; text is missing the first letter &#8212; easy enough when it&#8217;s written in Morse code and the letter is an I. It should read:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Classical Latin would spell the second word GYRUM and the last one IGNE, but this is good Mediaeval (aka Vulgar) Latin. It means &#8220;At night we go into a gyre [= whirl\/circle\/ring] and are consumed by fire&#8221;. That&#8217;s not a very clear or satisfying meaning, but better than average for palindromes. With one more syllable at the beginning, it would be an epic (dactylic hexameter) line: again, that&#8217;s probably the best meter we can expect from a palindrome. The version with ECCE (&#8220;look!&#8221;) inserted after NOCTE fulfills (barely) the minimum requirements for a hexameter, but the meaning is even clunkier.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.archimedes-lab.org\/atelier.html?http:\/\/www.archimedes-lab.org\/latin.html\">This site<\/a> has some interesting, but not entirely accurate, information on the words (click on Palindromes \u2013 it\u2019s the first one on the right). I don&#8217;t see anything macaronic about the line, and suspect that a moth would be at least as likely as a mayfly to fly in circles and be consumed by fire. I wonder if this gyre has anything to do with the one Yeats asked someone or other to perne in in &#8220;Sailing to Byzantium&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lileks finds some coded Latin, but concludes that it must be gibberish, since the online Latin translator couldn&#8217;t handle it. That just shows how stupid machines are. It is not quite classical Latin, but close enough to have a meaning. Lileks&#8217; text is missing the first letter &#8212; easy enough when it&#8217;s written in Morse [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}