"Give it a burl, yer fisho"

Bice asked me to translate "striving for boredom" into Latin. I'm slowly teaching myself Latin in my spare time, and am still very much a beginner. I couldn't just translate it off the cuff, so here's what I did.

First, I looked up to strive and boredom in my Latin dictionary. It offers contendere for to strive and lassitudo for boredom. Then I looked up for.

For has a lot of meanings. Does it refer to advantage, duration, price, being in lieu of something, a purpose or what? I figured "purpose" looked about right and of the two suggestions I picked ad, guessing that in wasn't quite right. I confirmed this by looking up the synonym towards.

The dictionary quite helpfully tells me that ad expects to be followed by an accusative. So, I flipped to the back of the dictionary where it explains how to turn a noun from the way it appears in the dictionary (i.e. the nominative case) into the accusative case.

Guess what? Latin turns out to be pretty complicated! The forms of a noun don't changed based on gender, as I had guessed, but on "declension", a made up category of grammar even sillier than gender. I knew lassitudo was feminine, but not which declension it was. The dictionary didn't give examples of feminine words ending with –do so I resorted to the Internet. Googling for "lassitudo declension" quickly shewed it to be in declinatio tertia.

"Let's see nominative, vocative, accusative—ah! lassitudonēs looks right". Except that lassitudonēs means "boredoms". This prompted a short philosophical tangent whereby Bice and I discussed whether one could have multiple boredoms. Results were inconclusive. Lassitudem looks to be right.

So far, we have ______ ad lassitudem. Time to learn verbs!

This is where I got really confused. Is striving is a gerund? I don't think so. It would be if the motto were "Striving is great", but in this case someone is actually striving.

Tense was less tricky. It's not past, it's not future, pluperfect or future perfect. It's not passive or subjunctive either, although I don't think these are tenses. Present seems to be the only sensible choice, and the examples in the dictionary helped verify this. Contendere ends with –ere (not –ēre!), so it looks like it's in the third conjugation.

Latin verbs, like German ones, really seem to need a person. Cogito means I think. Bice and I decided that "We're striving" was the meaning we intended, so I went for third person. Contendo, contendis, contendit!

A quick Google for "contendit ad" showed that others have used similar constructs, notably contendit ad perfectionem, so at least it's not an original mistake.

So, that leaves us with contendit ad lassitudem. Not this blogger's motto, honestly!

Hypothesis

Karma Police and Ballad of a Thin Man are actually the same song in the Platonic world of forms.

Used Tickets

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY PRESENTS
A SYDNEY IDEAS LECTURE
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT

Thu 19 June 2008


John Micklethwait is the current editor of the Economist — a newspaper to which I subscribe. He tried to get us thinking using "provocative paranoia". Sadly, I didn't take notes, so I'll have to dredge my memory for a possible later post.


Cinema 04
Prince Caspian (M)
Wed 18/06/2008


Like the Micklethwait lecture, this doesn't have any heroes. Unlike the lecture, it lacks decent villains too. At one point, the chief bad guy swirls his cape menacingly as he steals the throne from Caspian. I spent the whole film thinking about Philip Pullman's opinions on Susan and how Edmund seemed along for the ride (except for one awesome moment near the Stone Table).

Just read the book: it's cheaper, more enjoyable and won't take much longer than watching the film.

Yeats, Poor Planning, and Sausage

I missed out on going to church tonight due to an unfortunate accident with my laundry — I did all of it in one go, leaving me with neither socks nor clean outer garb.

Instead I've idled a bit around the house, flicking through some Yeats and the Introduction to the Penguin edition of same. This bit's worth repeating:

Yeats's commitment to the potency of the word was also connected with his belief in the virtues of English as it was spoken in those parts of Ireland which had not yet been corrupted by the 'base idiom' of the newspapers, … 'a speech exhausted from abstraction'. In the Elizabethan period Irish writers 'belonged to the old individual, poetical life, and spoke a language [Irish] in which it was all but impossible to think an abstract thought'.

Later,

[Yeats] remembered that he had found himself 'continually testing both my verse and my prose by translating it into dialect' … helping him 'to get back to the definite and concrete away from modern abstractions'.

Which reminds me of Orwell's translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into "modern English" from Politics and the English Language, and of the introduction to Roger Ebert's review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which has these concrete words:

The Indiana Jones movies were directed by Steven Spielberg and written
by George Lucas and a small army of screenwriters, but they exist in a
universe of their own. Hell, they created it. All you can do is compare one to the other three. And even then, what will it get you? If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best?

Such a capable meat.

Neighbours are getting noisy again, time to plot my escape.

Decisions Made

I've decided to move to Nick's place in Lindfield. I've spoken with my property manager and expect to move there in a couple of weeks time. I'll miss Glebe, but I'm sure I'll find ways to console myself.

I've also decided to take a break from World of Warcraft and focus on Free Software for a bit.

Also, I now own a brand new filing cabinet. It is so beautiful and oblong.

Moving

I've been living in a unit in Glebe for a few months now and am thinking of finding a sharehouse. In particular, a sharehouse where everyone else has day jobs, so I can work from home without undue distraction.

The dilemma I face is this: do I stay in the Inner West, or do I move to the North Shore? I like the Inner West more, but the North Shore is more convenient. O dilemma wretched! In particular, if I move to another place in the Inner West, then I should start to think seriously about switching to a more local church.

That said, I'll be looking at a place in Lindfield on the weekend — let's see how it goes.

Back in Sydney

I'm back in Sydney, really back, and I'm happy.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Prague at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Prague's a great looking city, and I hope I get to back there and explore it and enjoy some more Staropramen.

Off to play some Mario Kart with Andrew.