Pedants' Paradise

[P. G. Tipps]

Well, sixteenthly, I don't think that can be right. How could being led into (in + acc) be inferred from 'not necessarily by definition incompatible in paradisum' which must refer to what the situation is in (in + abl) paradise? Anyway, ah has said it was a typo which seems the easiest explanation.

Incidentally, when editing medieval texts, a lectio difficilior is usually preferable

It looks like there may be quite a few more closet members of the Church of Rome on this thread than in some forum members' very worst nightmares ...

[french frank]

Yes - Uncle Jack must have used the original, and the kids have remembered it faultylyly. (Which is why it is appropriate in a novel in which women are infantilized and commodified, no?)

As you say: no

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[jean]

Obviously no!

Whether Atwood only or the whole class got it wrong, she neither knows nor cares about the original, so she can't be making a point of not using it.

[Bryn]

It would be an extraordinary coincidence if they came up with 'carborundorum' without ever having heard the original 'carborundum', don't you think?

Nothing surprising about it at all. When Atwood was in secondary or tertiary education a carborundum stone would have been in many households' tool kits, used for sharpening/grinding down, a wide range of metal cutting instruments. I have a couple, of different levels of coarseness, which as mentioned earlier, I still rely on.

[Then, of course, there's Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis. ]

[french frank]

Nothing surprising about it at all. When Atwood was in secondary or tertiary education a carborundum stone would have been in many households' tool kits, used for sharpening/grinding down, a wide range of metal cutting instruments.

I think it was the coincidental aspect which jean was commenting on, not whether she [Attwood] knew what a carborundum was.

NB Secondary school, surely, since she referred to 'children'.

[Bryn]

I think it was the coincidental aspect which jean was commenting on, not whether she [Attwood] knew what a carborundum was. ...

My update, posted some 10 minutes prior to your message quoted above, deals with the question of 'coincidence'.

[french frank]

My update, posted some 10 minutes prior to your message quoted above, deals with the question of 'coincidence'.

A characteristic gnomic utterance

Plus a later corrected typo …

[jean]

Nothing surprising about it at all...

Don't be silly! Atwood was a girl!

But seriously: telling us that Atwood had good reason to know the word carborundum and the substance it denotes does not explain the coincidence as I set it out.

It's not just that two people or groups of people knew the word carborundum and what it meant. We also have to suppose that each, with no knowledge of what the other was up to, wrote a piece of cod-Latin in which they transfomed the English noun into a Latin verb.

Or rather, that one of them noticed that the English noun had exactly the form of a Latin gerundive, and formed a Latin sentence which would have been perfectly grammatically correct if carborundum had been a gerundive.

But the other (independently, we're asked to believe) added a genitive plural ending to carborundum, and constructed a sentence which only looked like Latin, and then only if you didn't look too closely.

For Atwood to have made conscious use in her book of one version rather than the other, she would have had to realise at some point that there were two versions. When did she realise, do you think? And if it's true that the existence of the two is pure coincidence and they have nothing to do with each other, what possible point could she have been making (about American education, or anything else) by choosing one over the other?

[ahinton]

Yes - but that's because we're dealing there with the inadequacies of the medieval scribe who, when copying something he couldn't understand, made it into something easier, which he could!

That makes it sound akin to an AH typo...

[P. G. Tipps]

Don't be silly! Atwood was a girl!

But seriously: telling us that Atwood had good reason to know the word carborundum and the substance it denotes does not explain the coincidence as I set it out.

It's not just that two people or groups of people knew the word carborundum and what it meant. We also have to suppose that each, with no knowledge of what the other was up to, wrote a piece of cod-Latin in which they transfomed the English noun into a Latin verb.

Or rather, that one of them noticed that the English noun had exactly the form of a Latin gerundive, and formed a Latin sentence which would have been perfectly grammatically correct if carborundum had been a gerundive.

But the other (independently, we're asked to believe) added a genitive plural ending to carborundum, and constructed a sentence which only looked like Latin, and then only if you didn't look too closely.

For Atwood to have made conscious use in her book of one version rather than the other, she would have had to realise at some point that there were two versions. When did she realise, do you think? And if it's true that the existence of the two is pure coincidence and they have nothing to do with each other, what possible point could she have been making (about American education, or anything else) by choosing one over the other?

Oh come on, the answer is dead easy ...

The type of Latin spoken by common and foreign folk became increasingly Vulgar unlike in the Church of Rome where it remained pure and infallible.

Didn't you know ?

[french frank]

what possible point could she have been making (about American education, or anything else) by choosing one over the other?

Obvious - because the righter of the inscription got it even wronger …

[jean]

But it was the powerful man who told her what to right! So he got it wrong!

But as Nigel Molesworth well knew, and I wish I could find the passage online, gerunds are very tricky indeed and asking questions about them is a very good way of catching out your Latin teacher.

[jean]

The type of Latin spoken by common and foreign folk became increasingly Vulgar unlike in the Church of Rome where it remained pure and infallible.

Though not without the addition of new coinages for new things and new ideas.

Here are some, though as far as I can see, silicon carbide doesn't feature.

Perhaps you should tell His Holiness of the omission.

[Pulcinella]

... indeed so : and we can further discuss whether the full stop necessary after the sentence ending 'pedant' needs to be supplemented by a further stop outside those quotation marks to conclude the sentence beginning with 'Perhaps... '.

We also need to determine whether there shd be a space between meant and the following colon, as continental usage normally requires, or whether we shd follow standard (but not without exceptions) English practice of leaving no space between a word and its succeeding colon : I see that keraulophon in #3493 adopts current standard English usage...

Having followed the psalm in the Book of Common Prayer at Choral Mat(t)ins today, I wondered idly (as one does) if the spaces around the colon (separating the parts of each verse) were introduced there with the specific purpose of extra visibility, or whether indeed it was standard practice in 1662 to have such spaces around a colon. The Preface did not appear to have any space before semicolons (I didn't spot a colon in my quick flick through).