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Only In Cambridge

Culture

From The Englishman comes news of this atrocity:

A development of luxury homes in Cambridge has been daubed with graffiti – written in Latin, of course.
Vandals spray-painted the new five-bedroom river-front houses with the words Locus in Domos Loci Populum.


Locals have said the messages, which appear to be a protest against the development, could “only happen” in the university city.
The homes, in Water Street, Chesterton, priced from £1.25m are on the site of an old pub.
Cambridge University Professor of Classics, Mary Beard, said: “This is a bit hard to translate, but I think what they’re trying to say is that a lovely place has been turned into houses.”

Oh, good grief, it’s not hard to translate at all. What the graffiti actually means is “Private homes from public land.”  (What makes her mis-translation worse is that it’s a classical — i.e. republican Roman — sentence construction, and not Byzantine or European Medieval, so it should be well within her wheelhouse.)

Sometimes I fear for the fate of Western culture, when graffiti-protesters know more about Latin than do university professors. Or when I understand Latin better than Mary Beard, for that matter. They must have had a special deal on Classics degrees at Tesco the day she got hers.

Update: I got an email from a Brit Reader who says that the real atrocity is labeling those houses as “luxury”. I agree.

Caution

General

Conversation between Doc and myself, this morning:

“Kim, the lawn guys are coming to mow the grass and spray the weeds in a few hours.”
“Okay.”
“So if you see some strange guys walking around the back…”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I know, don’t shoot any of them.”
“Just wanted to make sure…”

Life in a Gun Nut’s house is so complicated sometimes… shoot this guy, don’t shoot that guy, yadda yadda yadda… I think I’ll just go to the range later on today to avoid a potentially messy situation. Anyway, that new Ruger Mk.IV isn’t going to shoot itself, you know.

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

“Dear Dr. Kim,

Before we got married a year ago, my husband-to-be told me that after we got married, he would give up almost everything he did as a bachelor, except one thing: his Sunday morning fishing down at the lake near our house. He leaves before dawn (alone) without waking me up, and is back by about 11am before the weather gets too hot. Every Sunday. It’s starting to bug me; it’s like he wants to get away from me every week. He says it’s his chance to clear his head. I think he’s being selfish. I thought he would change after we got married, but he hasn’t. What should I do?”

—Fishing Widow, Northern Michigan

Dear Widow,
Let me be perfectly blunt, here. You said, “I thought he would change,” which is complete bullshit. What you’re really saying is, ”I thought I could change him,” and you couldn’t. He said he wanted his time alone to clear his head, and he does. More to the point, you agreed to let him have that time alone, and now you want to renege on the deal? Either you didn’t think it was going to be important, and that he’d quit eventually, or you were being dishonest and thought you could get him to stop. Well, he’s not going to stop, and you agreed to the arrangement.

My advice: suck it up, get up early with him, make him a flask of coffee to take along, and give him a loving good-bye kiss. If his time alone is that important to him – and quite frankly, I don’t think a couple hours’ solitude on a Sunday morning is excessive – then take him at his word. Which is what you should have done anyway, before you got married.

—Dr. Kim

Might Be Me

Culture

…this guy, that is; but it’s not, for two reasons: I have an alibi, and I wouldn’t be seen dead in Bristol.

This video shows a self-confessed ‘grammar vigilante’ who has been secretly correcting bad punctuation on signs and shop fronts in Bristol for the last 13 years.
By day the anonymous crusader is a highly-qualified professional with his secret known only to a handful of close family and friends.
But at night he becomes a shadowy figure who patrols the streets of Bristol, armed with his homemade ‘apostrophiser’ and purpose-built trestle.

Yes, I am a grammar Nazi like this guy. Worse than that, I am a grammar Nazi in several languages, especially in Latin, but more commonly in English.

Here’s an example of a typical Kim-the-grammar-Nazi rant:

Good grief, I hate accountant-speak (e.g. “…to 1.8% from 2.0%”).
In English (in which this report was written), we read from left to right, not to right from left; we go from point A to point B, not to B from A; we go from top to bottom, not to bottom from top; we run the gamut of emotions from A to Z, not to Z from A, and graphs (line and bar) also move from left to right along the x axis, not to right from left. (The basis for this construct is actually from the Latin idiom — “ab… ad…”, e.g. “ab terra ad astra”.)

And yes, if you look at the last sentence above, I put periods and commas outside quotation marks (where it’s not part of conversation), simply because that’s where they belong, and where all other punctuation can be found. Unless the comma or period is actually part of the quote, it should follow the quotation marks.

Observe this sentence:
The men were called “bullies,” “brutes,” “yobs,” and all other kinds of names.
Note how the quotation marks are awkwardly placed next to each other, and how the commas have no relevance to the words in quotes, which makes comprehension just a little more difficult and creates what I call a “cognitive speed-bump”. (See what I just did? The period ends the whole sentence and not the phrase, which is just part of the sentence.)
Now the sentence as it should be written:
The men were called “bullies”, “brutes”, “yobs” and all other kinds of names.
The commas are now in their proper role as separators, and not rootless nonentities drifting inside quotes.

Most American English grammar texts will differ from me and mark what I do as incorrect. I hate to say it, but I’m right and they’re wrong. Other than commas and periods, all other punctuation marks are written outside the quotes because they don’t belong inside; why should periods and commas be treated any differently? And that’s just my position on commas and periods; don’t even get me started on misspelled apostrophes. (“You mean apostrophe’s, Kim?”)

Grrrrr. Another reason I’m not the guy from Bristol is that there are no .45-caliber bullet-holes in those offensive signs. “Apostrophiser”? Bah.

 

Just Curious

General

I see that Amazon is facing an attack from the Usual Suspects who demand that they stop selling this Halloween costume.

But this isn’t about that, although I think it’s funny as hell (the protest, not the costume, which is kinda lame).

No, I’m curious to see if any of my Male Readers would be interested in getting one of these (my design and yes, I’ve trademarked it), which is guaranteed to trigger the LGBTOSTFU crowd:

Let me know, in Comments or by email, and I’ll get the thing rolling if the response is adequate.

 

 

Quotes From Disqus

Two-Minute Hate

On the topic of guns on college campuses, some foreign dipshit wrote:

“To my European-born mind, the idea of putting guns into the hands of the immature, excitable and perhaps alcohol-addled borders on madness.”

…to which I responded:

“And to my African-born mind, you’re full of shit. If 21-year-old college students are still that immature that they aren’t to be trusted with guns, perhaps we should raise the voting, driving and drinking age to 25.”

Someone was talking about Catholic schools, and that reminded me of a perennial thought:

“What I always enjoyed was Catholic schools using the Viking as a mascot for their sports teams. Talk about short memories…”

Finally, on the topic of “hydration”, someone was extolling the virtues of water, whereupon I commented:

“Last time I drank more than a mouthful of straight water was… actually, I can’t remember the last time I drank more than a mouthful of straight water. Yuck. Revolting stuff.”

My preferred method of ingesting water is when it’s in solid form and surrounded by Scotch or gin.

And now it’s time for my morning cuppa.