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Thanks posters for keeping this thread alive, while I played in the dirt. Really, the Blackberry Wars have started, again. Every Spring, I dress up in my heavy gardening armor and go out to do battle with the blackberry bushes that rule my land (in certain places only, other areas were already subdued). I injured several yesterday, and today must rest my back in readiness for the next battle. Killing a blackberry bush can take several years to accomplish without adding chemicals. Of course, I am an organic gardener. And thank you, Naoko, for the lovely link. I will check it out. Shortbread biscuit is such a cute name!

pectoral(2) - adj 1. of, situated in or on, or worn on the chest 2. relating to or good for diseases of the respiratory tract 3. coming from the breast or heart as the seat of emotion: SUBJECTIVE
 
A grouping that was too interesting to ignore;

peccable - adj liable or prone to sin

peccancy - noun 1. the quality or state of being peccant 2. OFFENSE

peccant - adj 1. guilty of a moral offense: SINNING 2. violating a principle or rule

peccavi - noun an acknowledgment of sin (I have sinned in Latin)
 
AllardChardon said:
A grouping that was too interesting to ignore;

peccable - adj liable or prone to sin

peccancy - noun 1. the quality or state of being peccant 2. OFFENSE

peccant - adj 1. guilty of a moral offense: SINNING 2. violating a principle or rule

peccavi - noun an acknowledgment of sin (I have sinned in Latin)
Click to expand...

Oh, I just suddenly got the idea of giving one of my next characters the last name of Peccavi. He could be that dark, brooding type who has a sexually perverse second life going on behind closed doors . . . . :devil:
 
Bumbledom - Behavior such as pettiness, fussiness, pomposity, arrogance and inefficiency by minor officials.
 
AllardChardon said:
A grouping that was too interesting to ignore;

peccable - adj liable or prone to sin

peccancy - noun 1. the quality or state of being peccant 2. OFFENSE

peccant - adj 1. guilty of a moral offense: SINNING 2. violating a principle or rule

peccavi - noun an acknowledgment of sin (I have sinned in Latin)
Click to expand...

LOL, my dad's company went for a project in the province of Sind in Pakistan once, and I was able to send a message saying: Peccavisti ne? (Have you sinned.)

You'll enjoy the article, Allard, as the lady gardener being featured was also anticipating struggles with blackberry bushes. When we moved into our house, I would have quite liked to have been confronted with blackberries instead of a waste of grimy concrete and dirty old gravel mixed with cigarette butts. People said, "Are you going to dig it out yourself?" Imagine how I laughed! It took two men with a pneumatic drill the whole day. We love our garden now, it's small but big enough for Piglet romping on the lawn and she gets her chalks out in the summer and draws pictures on the patio flagstones.

Bumbledom is a great word, Jenny17.
 
Welcome Jenny17, and I have met a few bumbledoms in my life.

Naoko, be careful what you wish for, regarding blackberries. Invasive is not nearly strong enough to describe their assaults. Wish that I could hire a couple of men for two days to drive them out. No such luck, but someday, they will be gone for good in certain places. I left one next to the house and put up a trellis for it to climb on. It provides a couple of good blackberry cobblers every year as well as lots of snacks, while watering it, so I do pick and choose my blackberry friends and foes.

Hi slyc_willie, nice to see you around again, and that sounds like a great idea.

There was one word in the middle of all those I previously posted that I want to list;

peccadillo - noun a slight offense
 
slyc_willie said:
Oh, I just suddenly got the idea of giving one of my next characters the last name of Peccavi. He could be that dark, brooding type who has a sexually perverse second life going on behind closed doors . . . . :devil:
Click to expand...

How about, instead, a brother/sister pair: Gloria Mundy and Peccata Mundy?

And a cousin named Agnes Day? She could encounter them as an attendant at a toll booth getting onto a toll road. After all, the ancient prayer is to Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi!
 
CarlusMagnus said:
How about, instead, a brother/sister pair: Gloria Mundy and Peccata Mundy?

And a cousin named Agnes Day? She could encounter them as an attendant at a toll booth getting onto a toll road. After all, the ancient prayer is to Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi!
Click to expand...

I don't know, Carlus; that seems a pretty sic transit for Gloria Mundy, wouldn't you say?
 
Peccavi and apocryphal telegrams

Quote from someone else's blog...

One of the Raj “traditions” that used to make me laugh was the insistence that the First Secretary of the Bengal Government could not see visitors until after he’d fiinished the day’s Times crossword. Never proven, but fun to think about, particularly if you were in a queue in Writers’ Building.

There were many apocryphal stories; one set (of three stories) in particular was of considerable interest to me, given my passion for words and puzzles.

Charles Napier, when capturing the province of Sindh in 1843, was meant to have sent a telegram with just one word on it: Peccavi.
Colin Campbell, similarly, is meant to have sent one that just said Nunc Fortunatus Sum when he arrived in Lucknow.
And, to complete the set, Lord Dalhousie is credited with sending just Vovi when annexing Oudh.

Peccavi. I have sinned. Nunc Fortunatus Sum. I am in luck now. Vovi. I have vowed.

There are many arguments as to whether any of these events actually happened, with people focusing on particular angels and particular pins. For example, it is said that a 17-year old girl named Catherine Winkworth wrote in to Punch to say that Napier should have said Peccavi, and that the Punch cartoon published in May 1844 was directly as a result of the letter, that Napier never said it.

I don’t know the answer, there is no evidence that Napier actually sent the telegram. But there is evidence that Napier was born in Whitehall, that he went to school in Celbridge in Eire, a place with a history of 5000 years of habitation, a place that had a school since 1709, that “Ireland’s richest man” then, William “Speaker” Conolly, built his mansion there at the turn of the 18th century. So there is some likelihood that Napier was educated enough to have said it. As I study the other pronouncements attributed to Napier, I tend to have some sympathy with the view that he actually sent the message, even if Miss Winkworth did write a letter a year later.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t actually matter whether Napier said it or not. What matters is the accessibility of the story.

In the past, the Peccavi story would only have made sense to people who understood Latin and who had a facility with Empire history and geography. A limited set of people.
 
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Jenny17 said:
Bumbledom - Behavior such as pettiness, fussiness, pomposity, arrogance and inefficiency by minor officials.
Click to expand...

Bumbledom is from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist after Mr Bumble the Beadle of whom Oliver asked "Please sir, can I have some more?"

Mr Bumble was an exemplar of officious petty figures of authority.
 
AllardChardon said:
...

pectoral(2) - adj 1. of, situated in or on, or worn on the chest 2. relating to or good for diseases of the respiratory tract 3. coming from the breast or heart as the seat of emotion: SUBJECTIVE
Click to expand...

Most high class Egyptian Mummies were buried with a decorative pectoral, as were some Anglo-Saxon nobles.

Some consider the gorget, as worn by some WW2 German soldiers, as a relic of a pectoral, which itself was a reduced form of armour.
 
Og, I'm quite sure Napier sent that telegram. I was plagiarising his message in mine, so it must be true. Anyway, mine is true because I was there. LOL.

Surely the people in the collaborative story Willie, Carlus and Tio are writing must be driving a transit van. :D

Complete change of tone, I adore that phrase Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, and will play religious music singing it over and over again. I don't know why the Latin is so much more heart-rending than the English, maybe it's the twisting of the 'agn' sound. Or maybe it just is.

We have blackberries in the lane, at the back of the house Allard. There's a raspberry cane - just one, near the Fella's parents home. Piglet and I spotted two raspberries on it one year. Day after day we walked past it and gently squeezed them, they weren't quite ripe. Then one day they were gone. :mad: Poor Piglet! I often buy her raspberries now to make up for it, don't worry, she gets plenty!

:heart:
 
NaokoSmith said:
Og, I'm quite sure Napier sent that telegram. I was plagiarising his message in mine, so it must be true. Anyway, mine is true because I was there. LOL.

:heart:
Click to expand...

I should have made it clear that my post about the telegram was a quote. I've edited it now.

All British officers and Civil Servants in India in the 19th Century would have understood Latin and Greek. They were a major part of their schooling. Even in the 1960s Latin was required for many University courses, especially for Oxford and Cambridge, and for applicants for senior posts in the British Civil Service.

My Latin studies started at age 9. :rolleyes:
 
oggbashan said:
I should have made it clear that my post about the telegram was a quote. I've edited it now.

All British officers and Civil Servants in India in the 19th Century would have understood Latin and Greek. They were a major part of their schooling. Even in the 1960s Latin was required for many University courses, especially for Oxford and Cambridge, and for applicants for senior posts in the British Civil Service.

My Latin studies started at age 9. :rolleyes:
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I remember that my secondary school, which I left in 1960, announced that Latin would be taught; starting the year after I left.

Qui Bono?
 
Handley_Page said:
I remember that my secondary school, which I left in 1960, announced that Latin would be taught; starting the year after I left.

Qui Bono?
Click to expand...

I'm not of the generation or sex who were supposed to do Latin and owe my patchy knowledge to my mother's standing up at a PTA meeting and asking if the tertiary college could offer it to pupils. I'm so grateful, I love to read Latin although I'm not very good at it. I love how you can put the words where you want to, the placing of words in the sentences is not a necessary part of their meaning because of the suffixes determining meaning. To understand a language which works so differently gives you creative freedom when writing. (Bit too much, some of my readers mutter as they struggle to grasp my curiously ordered writing!)

(Whisper: cui bono, HP :rose:.)
 
Just wanted to add this to this lovely discussion;

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

which means:

Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

Since my main character is Catholic, I might as well have her pray this lovely prayer on the perfect occasion, which I have not written, yet. Thanks for the wonderful idea.
 
I enjoy some of the Latin music sung by choirs but my favourite piece is this:

Eli Jenkin's Prayer by Dylan Thomas

Yesterday I was on the telephone to the organiser of the conference I went to on Saturday. We found out that we went to the same school and were swapping memories about the Headmaster.

That Head was a Classicist. Latin and Greek were major subjects and the top sets in each were taught by the Headmaster himself, a great honour. He was an Emeritus Professor of Latin.

My contact and I overlapped by only a few months. He started the year before I left that school, but I had been in Australia when he joined. I reminded him that some of the graffiti in the toilets was in schoolboy-composed Greek. He couldn't understand that, but the majority of the scrawls were in Latin by the time he finished at the school. The Headmaster had retired and scholars of Greek had been outnumbered by those studying Russian...

And yes, there was graffiti in Russian, but unlike the Greek it wasn't in metrical form.
 
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