{"id":243,"date":"2006-08-04T12:34:13","date_gmt":"2006-08-04T17:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=243"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:42:14","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:42:14","slug":"etymological-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=243","title":{"rendered":"Etymological Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenter Daniel San on Tim Blair’s blog has a question<\/a> about the name of leftie blog Larvatus Prodeo<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

Could someone who knows a bit of Latin please tell me what that name means. I\u2019m betting it\u2019s quite pompous.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The guesses offered by other commenters are mostly off-target. For instance, guinsPen<\/a> suggests that “Larvatus = Barking” and “Prodeo = Moonbats”. Though obviously a guess, that is actually half-right.<\/p>\n

The About Larvatus Prodeo<\/a> page credits the name, pompously, to the juvenilia of René Descartes, as quoted by Jacques Maritain, quoted in turn by a William Gaddis fan site, and translates, redundantly, ‘Like an actor wearing a mask, I come forward, masked, on the stage of the world.’<\/p>\n

This may be a correct rendering of Descartes’ idiosyncratic Renaissance Latin, but is only half-right for standard classical Latin. The word prodeo<\/em> does indeed mean ‘I come forward’: eo<\/em> is ‘I go’, pro<\/em> is ‘forward, in front’, and the d<\/em> is inserted for euphonic reasons. But larvatus<\/em> does not mean ‘masked’ in classical Latin. To quote the Oxford Latin Dictionary<\/em>, it means ‘possessed by evil spirits, demented’. Having visited the site, I find the name singularly appropriate. Of course, the Cartesian interpretation of the name would be more appropriate to some kind of Straussian secret-teaching blog than the one that proudly wears it. Perhaps the secret teaching is that the bloggers are demented and their blog is therapeutic? Or are they right-wingers pretending to be left-wingers to discredit the left — boring from within, as it used to be called when done the other way around?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commenter Daniel San on Tim Blair’s blog has a question about the name of leftie blog Larvatus Prodeo: Could someone who knows a bit of Latin please tell me what that name means. I\u2019m betting it\u2019s quite pompous. The guesses offered by other commenters are mostly off-target. For instance, guinsPen suggests that “Larvatus = Barking” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics","category-orbilius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","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=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}