Daniel Mendelsohn’s New Yorker piece on Catullus (archived) begins arrestingly “Was it something to do with blow jobs?” He’s reminiscing about a collegiate struggle with a poem:
In class that morning, I’d been called on to sight-translate a handful of lines by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the first-century-B.C.E. poet who, the professor had warned us, was among the most erudite and sophisticated, the most doctus, of all Roman writers. In the poem at hand, Catullus ruefully recalls having served on the staff of a provincial governor, bitterly referring to him—because he didn’t let his subordinates enrich themselves at the expense of the locals—as an irrumator. When I stumbled across the unfamiliar noun, I hazarded a guess: “Cheapskate?” Professor Stocker, who’d got his Ph.D. before the Second World War and liked to wear bow ties, pursed his lips, made a face, and declared, a little too loudly, “You may render that word as ‘bastard.’ ”
So I did. But something about his discomfiture had made me curious. That evening, in the library, I took down a Latin dictionary from the shelf and flipped to the “I”s. Within moments, I saw why he’d hurried me past the word.
He goes on to talk about the two Catulluses, the “impetuous, often swaggering young writer” who tossed obscene insults around and “the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions”:
This Catullus produced a handful of longer works that include a baroquely structured mini-epic about the marriage of Achilles’ parents and a gender-bending showstopper that the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has called “the strangest poem in Latin”: a breathless narrative, cast in an extremely rare and agonizingly complex meter, about an Athenian youth named Attis, who, in a frenzy of devotion to the cult of the Eastern goddess Cybele, castrates himself. Much of the poem takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets.
I vaguely remembered that poem, and pulled out my good old bilingual Catullus (bought in far-off 1974) to see what it was like. (I’m not sure “agonizingly complex” is the right description of Galliambic verse; I’d prefer “baggy.” But people seem to have a hard time with classical meters beyond dactylic hexameter, iambic trimeter, elegiac couplets, and Sapphics.) I made my way through the first few lines with little trouble, but I stumbled when it came to l. 5:
devolvit ili acuto sibi pondera silice.
Um, ‘rolls with a sharp’ … what? What the heck is “ili”?? So (being lazy and not having a dictionary to hand) I googled “devolvit ili acuto,” and here we arrive at the monstrosity that prompted this post. The results began, as usual in these benighted times, with an “AI Overview”:
The phrase “devolvit ili acuto” means “he/she/it rolled down the sharp (or pointed) stone” or “he/she/it rolled down the sharp edge” in Latin.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
devolvit:
This is the third-person singular present active indicative form of the verb “devolvō,” which means “to roll down” or “to turn back”.ili:
This is the ablative singular of the noun “īlis,” which means “stone” or “cliff”.acuto:
This is the ablative singular of the adjective “acutus,” which means “sharp,” “pointed,” or “keen”.
Great! Thanks, AI, that’s exactly what I needed! A little odd that it translates devolvit as “rolled” when it goes on to say that it’s present tense, but you can’t expect perfection. But then I decided to check the unfamiliar word īlis, and Wiktionary explained that 1) the nominative was in fact īle (it’s a third declension neuter, genitive īlis) and 2) it means ‘private parts, genitals.’ (The more common plural īlia means ‘groin’ or ‘intestines,’ whence English iliac.)
Mehercle!!
So it hallucinated a nominative “īlis,” and, far worse, a meaning ‘stone; cliff’ that it plucked from who knows where (perhaps extrapolating from silice later in the line?). This is way beyond sloppy; this is active destruction of the fragile network of sense that holds our human world together. Remember, friends don’t let friends use AI!
Incidentally, for the word era ‘mistress’ in the penultimate line Wiktionary provides no etymology; Mallory and Adams, in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, refer to a “Latin-Hittite isogloss” and relate it to Hittite ishā- ‘master, lord, owner.’
Irrumare corresponds to an unaccountable gap in the Standard English basic obscene lexicon. The English don’t have a word for it … I dare say that more specialised lects have repaired this, however. (And the concept can, I believe, be conveyed by periphrasis.)
There is a graffito from Pompeii: Irruma medicos, presumably from a dissatisfied customer, though I suppose it might be an advertisement for a forward-looking holistic medical practice.
Era and erus reminded me of Welsh arwr “hero, warrior”, but disappointingly, if GPC is to be believed, the ar- part is just the preposition “on.” So it’s merely Übermensch.
From irrumō (“to force receptive male oral sex”) + -tor.
So how did the Romans say “to offer receptive male oral sex” ? irrumari ? Maybe they couldn’t imagine any other mode of participation but force.
It’s odd that heteros will call someone a “cocksucker” e.g. as if the activity in question were disgusting. Whereas in fact it’s great fun (given the appropriate skill set), regardless of the voice of the verb. Some prudish hetero “allies” are upset about the very word and would like to ban it altogether. They’re so obsessed with the delivery that they lose track of the plot.
Only “bad cocksucker” is a slur. Similarly, I think “butt buddies” is a sweet designation for a sweet kind of relationship. On Facebook once a group of woke bitches tore into me for using it. In vain did I flash my credentials.
It’s all very well for Catullus to have been impetuous, swaggering and young, but he clearly didn’t know shit about this stuff.
Anyway it’s rude to speculate about other people’s sexuality. Miss Singh says so in Heartstopper.
I wonder whether AI ran off course on some older dictionary defining īle as “stones,” in the “testicles” sense.
This sort of error does highlight that ChatGPT and its modern AI friends are essentially autocomplete running amok; it works by association, not meaning. The expert-system “AIs,” which are older and seem lately to have been lumped in with ChatGPT, are older and were at least before the boom much more carefully trained (particularly in medical uses).
Irrumare corresponds to an unaccountable gap in the Standard English basic obscene lexicon.
Nope. Face-fuck. That’s hardly periphrastic.
Modern English has no word pitched at the same register though. „Face fuck” strikes me as too low and all the other work arounds (e.g. „force to fellate” ) are not colloquial. „Irrumo” seems to have been a common word denoting a demeaning act but it’s not clear the word itself was taboo.
friends don’t let friends use AI!
One of the terrible surprises I’ve encountered recently on Youtube is clicking on channels that are aimed at learners of a given language like ones with podcasts or stories for beginners and intermediates but the content is made mostly or completely with AI. I suppose some of them might have a real person reviewing and editing the material but it was really off-putting when I realized that the smooth voices I heard and the pretty faces I saw on the thumbnail must have been computer generated.
So far I’ve only noticed it on videos for French learners but I wouldn’t be surprised if these things are popping up on channels for other popular languages too.
Modern English has no word pitched at the same register though.
None of the languages I know have many words “pitched at the same register” as corresponding ones in the other languages. So what ? You simply have to pitch differently depending on whether the batter is right- or left-handed.
„Face fuck” strikes me as too low
Depends on the company you keep. Also, the irrumatee always must be lower, for reasons I hardly need to spell out. But not too low. That was the Profumo affair. And the Duchess of York scandal somewhat later.
I wonder whether AI ran off course on some older dictionary defining īle as “stones,” in the “testicles” sense.
That occurred to me, but the alternative suggestion “cliff” seemed to make it unlikely.
Later on in the NYkr piece we get this:
I don’t know if the translation is by Mendelsohn, but it’s wretchedly inadequate to Catullus’s pungent Latin; “Just why is something you might well ask” might as well be by the bow-tied Professor Stocker. Obviously there’s no way to do it justice, but it’s more like:
The register is a little wobbly, but it captures the intensity. Catullus isn’t being doctus here. (The verb excrucior is derived from crucio ‘to crucify; to torture,’ the cross [crux] being yer basic Roman way to give people a terrible death.)
The register is a little wobbly, but it captures the intensity.
The base line in that song just wastes me.
I rememeber once (perhaps accidentally?) asking Yandex AI about something and was pleased to find that the first of its two suggestions was “ask Google AI”. (or was it simly “search in Google”? Yandex is the Russian competitor of Google)
I did not follow this advice (or did I?:-/): I think Google AI would turn out to be an ignorant snob and would not redirect me to Yandex:)))
Out of curiosity I tried asking several LLMs “What does ‘devolvit ili acuto’ mean?” ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google Gemini 2.5 were all stumped by ili (guessing that it might be a typo for illi or the like), but at least none of them hallucinated an incorrect meaning; Gemini 2.0, oddly enough (since 2.5 is supposed to be significantly better), identified the phrase as from Catullus 63 and said of ili: “This word is somewhat debated in its exact meaning and grammatical case. It’s generally understood to refer to the groin or loins. It could be the genitive singular of ilium (groin), or potentially related to the plural ilia (groins).” Which might actually be about right; a dative from ile seems weird to me in the context, and apparently the genitive reading has in fact been suggested.
(For some mysterious reason, I don’t get an “AI overview” section at all when I Google the phrase.)
Catullus needs a good base line.
So how did the Romans say “to offer receptive male oral sex” ?
Fellare. I believe there is a learned derivative in English.
That’s an act, not an offer to act. irrumare is not an offer, because “force”. The Wiktionary link says ““to force receptive male oral sex”.
I was asking about a counterpart to “force”, which I assume is “offer”. From Sloterdijk I learned a distinction between Angebotsreligionen and Nachfragereligionen. Supply/demand is a different conceptual pair, not involving force.
It’s not a good idea to make an offer while fellating. It probably hurts.
I suppose one can offer to force, but that’s a civility gambit, not force. Failure to protest in a timely manner always counted as “consent”, in my experience. Guys new to the game sometimes find it hard to say “yes”, because that would be an admission of the unspeakable. There’s no need to kick the superego in the shins.
Do not wake a sleeping superego. Especially when it is only pretending to sleep, so that it can watch secretly. It’s just not ready to come out.
FWIW, this seems to be the Prof. Stocker in question (1914-2010): https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/9148-stocker-arthur-frederick
Just as a baseline, the same database’s entry on the long-dead fellow who was my teacher of Homeric Greek in spring 1986. (He apparently spent part of the Sixties floating around the UT-Austin classics scene, don’t know if his time there would have overlapped with Stu or not).
https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/8738-gould-thomas-fauss
Of course I knew Tom Gould. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Dinners at his house with all the gang were great fun. He was a good cook.
He didn’t “float around” the Classics Dept. I studied Greek with him, and with others such as Jimmy Hind. For Latin there was David Armstrong, who had an unreciprocated crush on me. Well, I did already have a boyfriend at the time. I think.
At one point Tom fell in love with Blake. It was Blake this, Blake that for at least two years. I mean William Blake of course. Tom was rather shy.
From your link:
#
For the late classicist Thomas Gould, who taught my introduction to ancient philosophy, the idea was atheism; he was as desperate to save us from Christianity as Wolterstorff was to follow its truth to distant corners.
#
I remember that now !
Exciting times, with Arion and everything.
Ah, so that’s how the ilium was named.
Estne de gustibus disputandum…
Armstrong gave me an edition of Sydney Smith’s sermons as a going-away-to-Germany present. Somehow it later got lost. But I had already read them, so it’s not that bad.
Another quote from JWB’s link:
Sounds like he would have been a lively teacher!
My memory of this is fuzzy but I may have even prevailed upon Tom Gould to write one of the recommendation letters for my law school applications. I to be quite frank spent so much of my undergraduate career manifestly not living up to my apparent academic potential that there weren’t too many professors I could have asked with a straight face …
He knew I was a linguistics major, and at one point the year after I’d been in his Homer class buttonholed me on the sidewalk to ask if I thought that the bare required minimum (probably as low as 5?) of students would actually sign up if the classics dep’t offered a class focused on the dialect differences within ancient Greek among Attic v. Doric v. Ionian etc.
At one point decades later I was making small talk while having been taken by my now-wife to have tea with the now-late Harold Bloom et ux., and I mentioned that I had been a student of Gould’s at which point Harold started telling quite a picaresque tale of a classics professor who had had to discreetly slink out of town after being caught in flagrante in some compromising situation by the New Haven police until Jeanne interrupted and said that wasn’t actually Gould and Harold’s aging memory had muddled him up with some other classicist who had been involved in the scandal in question.
A delightful tale, and a useful reminder about how seriously to take Bloom’s many obiter dicta.
Another bit from the Mendelsohn piece, near the end:
I dunno, that seems more clever than probable.
Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary says about irrumare:
The distribution being that the word occurs in Catullus, Martial, the Priapea and Pompeian graffiti. He also provides a lengthy quotation from Seneca that “by implication classed [irrumo] as obscene” (the relevant part is that Seneca uses obsceno verbo usus for irrumare).
While Prof. Gould was widely understood to be a “confirmed bachelor,” he didn’t teach us any dirty Greek that wasn’t actually in Homer’s own text.
after being caught in flagrante in some compromising situation by the New Haven police
Maybe he got bolder at Yale. He was shy and inexperienced, so he rarely embarked on risky activity. There was a bright young hunky student of Eng Lit (IIRC), quite a handful personality-wise, and also a wild alcoholic. Somehow Tom took him in at his house, maybe because the kid couldn’t pay his rent, something like that ? There were drunken rages etc. I never tried to find out more.
When using AI, the old Soviet saying always applies: “Trust, but verify.”
As for the etymology of erus, de Vaan lists several more or less plausible IE cognates, among them a Gaulish deity Esus or Aesus and the Hittite word quoted above, as well as possible Greek and Indo-Iranian cognates, but although he doesn’t reject any of them, and even reconstructs a Proto-IE form, he still ends with “the word remains isolated within IE”.
The abbreviation AI should be read as “artificial idiocy”. I don’t understand the amount of money and energy wasted on this crap.
When using AI, the old Soviet saying always applies: “Trust, but verify.”
A German counterpart is Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I’m not saying it would surprise me; if we had a note by Catullus himself saying “Here’s a bit of multilingual naughtiness I got away with,” I’d say “Clever lad!” But minus the note, it’s just a possible bit of cleverness a clever scholar came up with that might or might not have been in the poet’s head. The wording “the classicist Michael Fontaine has pointed out that the poet […] is actually indulging in an elaborate and risqué bilingual pun here” makes it seem as certain as discovering a new star or element, and I bristle.
I was using “Artificial Stupidity” lately; I’ll immediately replace that.
There are already lots of people who believe we’ve reached the Star Trek stage where you can ask a computer something and expect a reliable answer. They type questions into search engines, not knowing that search engines search for words instead of answering questions – and the search engines, or at the very least Google, have been reprogrammed to ignore wh- words instead of searching for them, too.
To this, add the fact that investors, CEOs, stockbrokers and the like are exceptionally good at wishful thinking, as we’re seeing right now. It’s more or less a job requirement.
Fair enough, I agree.
“… is actually indulging in an elaborate and risqué bilingual pun here”
There’s that “actually” again. It would have been easy and honest to write “is possibly indulging”.
“Actuality precedes Potentiality in Being, Time and Dignity”. This baneful thought-pattern permeates alteuropäisches Denken. I do have to admit, though, that it provides an answer to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.
On Valentine’s Day I was getting some work done at a cafe when a couple of students came in, sat at the next table, and settled down for an earnest and slightly weepy discussion about a letter one of them had received from her ex. After explaining how it had helped her to reach closure, she told her friend that she had run the letter through ChatGPT to check whether it was really sincere or not, and it had confirmed all that she had hoped.
I suppose it’s no more ridiculous than consulting a fortune-teller; there are some use cases where reliability is beside the point. Using it to calculate tariffs, on the other hand, puts me in mind of the ending of an old science fiction short story:
“The hope of the universe had lain with the Red Brain. And the Red Brain was mad.”
Good lord, Donald Wandrei — I hadn’t thought of him in decades! Mind you, he wrote that story when he was sixteen, so it would be unfair to judge him by it. (Not that he was ever any more than a minor writer.)
A couple of tidbits from Wikipedia:
@Lameen
How did she know that her ex had not asked ChatGPT to write the letter for him?
Maybe she thought that he had, and was asking whether ChatGPT saw that he was sincere when he explained his feelings for it to summarize.
While I share the doubts about Catulllus’ alleged bilingual pun, the Romans did do that sort of double entendre thing.
Adams’ indispensable work mentions landica, a word for “clitoris” so taboo that even Juvenal doesn’t use it, being alluded to by Cicero via “hanc culpam maiorem an illam dicam?”
I’m not sure that this supposed double-nature of Catullus isn’t just an artefact of projection of our modern Western notions of literary propriety onto a quite different culture. There were whole genres of by-no-means-plebby literature in which the Romans thought that obscenity was perfectly cromulent. Satire is not History. Hendecasyllables are not for writing uplifting epics about mythical heroes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fescennine_Verses
Obscenity was de rigueur in wedding festivals, too. (As indeed it is in some West African cultures: there is a whole subgroup of griots involved with weddings who are famed for this.)
And Catullus’ work survived for us by a whisker. Nearly all Latin literature has been lost. There may very well have been a whole lot of late-Republic poets with very much the same wide-ranging approach to language. Not every poet is exegi monumentum bloody Horace (who actually ignores Catullus. They wouldn’t have got on with each other …)
While I share the doubts about Catulllus’ alleged bilingual pun, the Romans did do that sort of double entendre thing.
Absolutely. Again, I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying you can’t assume it’s deliberate just because it’s such a cute idea and Catullus was such a clever lad.
I have to say that Isobel Williams’ version of the Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire poem really is very good:
She’s got the real Ezra Pound thing going on. Bugger accuracy! Give us a poem!
I think skull fuck is more evocative than face fuck.
Still cheating on the Eskimo-words-for-snow metric.
[Cartoon in Private Eye this week, captioned “Trump seeks control of Greenland”: two Kalaallit saying “We have more than fifty words for no.”]
Bugger accuracy! Give us a poem!
Damn straight!
There’s also the version of the “Lesbia nostra” poem by a character in Colin Dexter’s novel Daughters of Cain:
These seem to be called “after” poems these days, by the way.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the loser in a Roman lawsuit could be ordered to fellate the winner, to add humiliation to whatever other penalty the case resulted in.
Since others are looking up their old Classics professors at that Rutgers site.
A half dozen of us would pack into H. A. T. O. Reiche‘s office for 21.014/5 Greek Literature. Readings might include Euclid as well as the expected Plato and Sophocles. Afterwards, we would adjourn to a nearby dining hall for ice cream, which I think was the only time I ever ate on campus.
All the others had done introductory Greek at the Institute, from the nuclear chemist Irving Kaplan, using Ruck’s Ancient Greek: A New Approach. I’d had the old schoolboy standbys, Crosby & Schaeffer’s Introduction, Freeman & Lowe’s Reader, and Evelyn Abbott’s grammar Primer. I think I was the only one who had had any Latin as well. I remember there was some phraseology in the Greek that was very much like English and I asked whether that was unusual (it was not). Prof. Reiche guessed why but no one else saw it.
could be ordered to fellate the winner, to add humiliation to whatever other penalty the case resulted in
How peculiar. That’s would effectively be punishment for both parties. Most guys really suck at sucking, if you get my meaning. Fact. And the loser could also accidentally-on-purpose bite.
Looks like the judge is saying “don’t annoy me again in future with such stupid litigation”.
It’s also conceivable that the “loser” was in remunerative cahoots with the judge. The whole thing was a setup so that the “loser” could get into the toga of the “winner” without the risk of getting punched. Would have been a lucrative side hustle for judges.
Please don’t throw me into the briar patch !
How peculiar. That’s would effectively be punishment for both parties. Most guys really suck at sucking, if you get my meaning.
Probably so. And I believe that the act had to be performed in public. So even being the winner wouldn’t seem to be that great a deal for a lot of people.
The Romans were into male nudity more than we are today. But even so …
But perhaps what Catullus was saying is that there were certain people who went around filing lawsuits against lots of people just hoping for the payoff.
A couple of observations on AI in regard to this post and its comments:
1. The AI bots get their information largely from whatever is available on the internet, and then come up with an answer that is a sort of best-guess median or average of everything they found. I’m currently reading my way through the Aeneid, and whenever I come across anything too tricky to be solved by consulting dictionaries, I’ll sometimes google for commentaries or explanations from others. And I am continually astonished by the enormous number of people on the internet who are merrily creating (and posting) their own translations of the Aeneid apparently without ever thinking to do what I am doing, i.e. they are just coming up with their own interpretation of the lines as if there wasn’t two thousand bloody years of existing commentaries and translations that they could consult for assistance. So there is a truly staggering amount of terrible renderings of Vergil all over the internet, and I am thus completely unsurprised that the AI bots don’t manage to come up with the right answer for such matters.
2. Lameen’s story about the woman consulting ChatGPT about the letter she received from her ex (“[ChatGPT] had confirmed all that she had hoped”) is yet another example of something that is evidently becoming one of the most popular and widespread functions of these AI bots: telling you what you want to hear. Lameen is right on the money with the comparison to a fortune-teller. I’m seeing so many examples of this: people using it to “do their own research” (aargh) to “find out the truth” (aaaargh) about some nonsense that they want to believe, or people genuinely using it as a therapist because it will tell them what they want to hear more than an actual therapist would, or even using it to give them a review of some article or book they’ve written—because, with enough prompting or follow-up questions, the AI will give them exactly the glowing feedback they crave.
People were already using google for some of those purposes, of course, but the AI bots truly take it to a whole other level, presenting the person’s own preferred beliefs back to them like the impartial conclusions of an intelligent and genial observer.
No longer do people need to form little crazy cult-like communities on the internet with others who share their delusions in order to get mutual reinforcement for those delusions—now they don’t need to leave the comfort of their own heads at all.
No longer do people need to form little crazy cult-like communities on the internet with others who share their delusions in order to get mutual reinforcement for those delusions—now they don’t need to leave the comfort of their own heads at all.
Then things would be back to pre-internet normal. That’s a good thing, right ?
The internet has been in big use for only 25 years or so. Before that, there were few customized crazy topics covered by books. The print runs were too small. If you didn’t get on one of the mass-transport bandwagons about the Primal Scream or Alien Lizards, you had to walk.
A good way to protect your delusions has traditionally been to keep your mouth shut and not listen to what other people say. And it reduces social friction. If AI bots promote this, that’s great.
That’s would effectively be punishment for both parties. Most guys really suck at sucking, if you get my meaning.
But Romans wouldn’t have thought of it as a sexual act, simply as dominance and humiliation. The recipient gets the pleasure of seeing his opponent forced to publicly acknowledge and demonstrate the recipient’s superior social position. If the story is even true, it’s not necessarily the case that the fellator was expected to do it to completion, just being put in that position might have been sufficient.
But you’re right about the biting risk. I’ve always wondered about the stories of Roman masters forcing their slaves to suck them off. Wouldn’t you be slightly concerned that an angry slave with little to lose might „snap”?
Was legal forced fellatio actually a thing? Not saying it wasn’t, but a brief trawl through Google Books doesn’t turn up anything, and it does have the air of a legend.
I think this is a myth.
From The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law (2015):
A well-trained LLM can produce pretty good fan fiction on occasion: “Beyond the Three.”
>It’s also conceivable that the “loser” was in remunerative cahoots with the judge. The whole thing was a setup so that the “loser” could get into the toga of the “winner” without the risk of getting punched. Would have been a lucrative side hustle for judges.
“Irruminative cahoots”?
Wiktionary says that Latin rumen (throat, gullet) is of disputed origin. Is it potentially relevant here, or is there no way to account for the second syllable?
I’m curious about how this training works when “everything they found” could only be a mere handful of papers, even though the views in those papers are now regarded as the scholarly consensus and can be safely presented to the public as accurate enough.
For example, I asked ChatGPT “how many vowels were there in Proto-Mari?”, thinking that it had surely been trained on Ante Aikio’s 2014 paper on the subject and a few subsequent publications. I got an answer “there were three vowels: *a, *i, and *u”, which is wildly inaccurate and presumably shows that books on the history of the Semitic languages had an outsized role in ChatGPT’s training.
When Christianity came to dominate the empire, the cruelty of penalties generally was not reduced but, if anything, intensified.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
how many vowels were there in Proto-Mari?
Wonder if it was thrown off (so to speak) by Mari the ancient city in Syria?
While we’re at it, is everybody here who’s used lesbiazomen in the same sentence with “bilingual” engaging in deliberate cleverness? I doubt it.
I just checked with a different query, “How many vowels were there in Proto-Permian?” (ChatGPT was presumably trained on all the papers on this, too, in recent years, as they are all open-access), and I got the same utterly erroneous answer, so this is a flaw in ChatGPT’s training:
Rephrasing the question as “What was the vowel system of Proto-Permian?” gives me a different answer, that there were five vowels *a, *e, *i, *o, *u, but this is very wrong, too. In fact, laughably so, since the answer starts with “The vowel system of Proto-Permian, the reconstructed ancestor of the Permian languages, is typically described as having a relatively simple structure”, yet Permian vocalism is notoriously complicated.
whole genres of by-no-means-plebby literature in which the Romans thought that obscenity was perfectly cromulent
and the whole andalusi hebrew golden age!
and here’s roz kaveney’s catullus – which i quite like; my very small latin doesn’t give me what to judge its accuracy with – on the subject of poetry as biography:
Eat out my pussy while I fuck you hard
my hands up both your arses. Silly boys,
you prissy queens, because my verse enjoys
making hot love, that doesn’t mean I’m tarred
with the same filthy brush. I might be chaste
as anything. A poem might say “fuck,”
dabble its fingers in all kinds of muck,
turn people on perhaps, if they’ve a taste
for all that sort of thing. Old men with piles
don’t get hard otherwise; bored wives are wet
reading my verses. But you still don’t get
to think I’m a slut or virgin. Snarky smiles
will get you hurt. Oh, I will make you shout,
fistfuck your arses while you eat me out.
[poem 16]
@rozele
One shudders at what she would do with a lyric like “drop-kick me, Jesus [Ed., the drop-kicker is Jesus, although one could be forgiven for thinking He is the drop-kickee] through the goalposts of Grace”.
Excellent work !! Prying fans fuck off.
As I was reading the poem rozele quoted I was thinking “Stu is going to love this.”
Am I so predictable ? <* blushes prettily *>
to me, kaveney sits with marilyn hacker as some of the few living english-language poets whose writing in traditional forms uses those forms to do the things the forms are there to do, rather than for a basically abstract reason. her occasional sonnets are maybe the best currently being written – a lot are here (though not recent ones) – and i love many of her other sonnets, too.
Stu Clayton: while I don’t have J.N. Adams’ book “The Latin Sexual Vocabulary” handy I believe the fellator is the face-fuckee and the irrumator the face-fucker.
@Sean: Right. Far up this thread I responded to the claim that there is “an unaccountable gap [for irrumare] in the Standard English basic obscene lexicon”. Which is wrong, because face-fuck.
“Face-fuckee” is more or less the same as “cocksucker”, except that the former leaves open whether the necessary skillz are present. Unfortunately, the latter (and fellator too) does not reliably imply their presence. caveat irrumator, I alluz say.
Etymology and comp.lit. are unable to address these crucial distinctions.
Stu: I think looking cute and overwhelmed as someone ravages your mouth is a skill just like working your lips and tongue and fingers! Not choking or throwing up at an awkward moment too (unless your partner likes that).
Absolutely ! Sex is staged in the imagination after age 20 or so, when plain sensuality has lost its luster (due to overindulgence). Reality is then needed only as a backdrop.
I saw a short film recently in which a guy shook a shitload of pepper onto a single french fry already drenched in ketchup, to enhance the taste. The story of my life !
Stu: also keep in mind that the free Latin dictionaries on the Internet were not written or published by today’s queer scene so have certain perspectives on same-sex play. So just because a public domain dictionary says “to force receptive male sex” does not mean that the “force” and “male” are in every ancient text that uses a word.
Heather Rose Jones has an ongoing project on the treatment of female-female activities by philologists and literary scholars. She has found exceptions to simple definitions like “futuere is to penetrate a vagina.”
@Sean: I’m all for such projects. In the meantime, I’ll stick with English.
BTW I very much dislike the word “penetrate” in this connection. It prejudices understanding. The activity in question is more like homecoming than housebreaking. More like baking than trespassing.
But that’s just a guy’s point of view. I have no idea of the many ways women might experience it/them. I expect to be awarded a meddle someday for not having done so in women’s affairs.
I suppose the word is tolerable in an academic environment, but even there it is misleading.
Someone should write a book: “How to Do Words with Things”.
What might be a Latin-based term meaning “slide into the oven” ? Or “check that all the lights are off” ? These are not “euphemisms” !
One shudders at what she would do with a lyric like “drop-kick me, Jesus [Ed., the drop-kicker is Jesus, although one could be forgiven for thinking He is the drop-kickee] through the goalposts of Grace”.
(“Goalposts of life”, according to the Internet and my memory.)
OMG, the Bobby Bare who sang “500 miles away from home”.
“Goalposts of Grace” sounded snappy and soppy, but would make no sense in the song. “Goalposts of life”, on the other hand, just makes me tired and despondent.
Paramour perked me up again. Some of Anna Meredith’s music is used in The Favourite. John Adams go home !
If Jesus were the drop-kickee, who would the drop-kicker then need to be? Satan? Some malevolent Gnostic demiurge? The best Nashville songwriters try to steer clear of such theologically-fraught shoals.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the future Sir Raymond Davies tried to weave together theology and some other sport they play over there in his lyrics, leading to baffling-to-American-listener stanzas like:
Now the Devil has a player and he’s called the Demon Bowler
He’s shrewd, he’s rude and he’s wicked
He is sent by Sinful Satan and he’s out to take your wicket
And you know that that’s not cricket
He’ll baffle you with googlies with leg breaks and offspin
But keep a level head and don’t let that demon in
So keep a straight bat at all times, let the Bible be your guide [etc etc]
He’ll baffle you with googlies
I’m already baffled.
Goo-goo-googely eyes!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z0dMYEJEOEg&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
Third base Triba-ulation [?],
If you pass you can make it in.
Third base means something different nowadays. Or not ?
And Satan’s pitchin’ the game.
He’ll do his best to strike you out –
Keep playin’ just the same.
Intially I thought she sang “psych you out”. But I doubt this expression goes so far back.
I knew her from Didn’t it rain, children. Same voice, different name.
If we may return briefly to Bobby Bare, I by chance just learned this weekend of the existence of quite high-quality audio/video recordings of a performance he did in April 1964 in, of all places, Oslo, Norway. This seems to have been less than a week after the Oslo performance I had long been aware of (because of the high-quality audio/video recordings of it) by Charles Mingus.* Whoever Norsk Rikskringkasting had assigned that month to the recording-performances-by-visiting-American-musicians team was very good at what they did by 1964-tv standards.
In any event, here’s the clip of “500 Miles,” which Bobby mischievously changes to “5,000 miles” at one point toward the end of the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXoqKGpf2sI
*Bobby may not have had much of a Scandinavian fanbase at that point, but he was on a package tour headlined by Jim Reeves, who did. Reeves unexpectedly died young only a few months later, as did Eric Dolphy, who had been in Mingus’ sextet for the Oslo gig. The musician’s life is fraught with actuarial hazards.
Re “psych you out,” the earliest citation in Green’s for something like the relevant sense is in a 1934 discussion of “Negro slang.” Greens’ earliest citation for the exclamation “psych!”* (which it glosses as “fooled you! just kidding!”) is from 1985. It calls it “campus/teen.” But I am sure I was aware of it in junior high school in the late Seventies and I am reasonably confident that it was similarly racially marked in origin – we suburban white adolescents mostly initially learned it from the black kids from the city who arrived at the same school because the federal courts had told the school-bus drivers to take them there. Although the racial distribution in time of usage in our little corner of the country might not have scaled up nationally, of course.
*Green’s also gives the variant spelling “sike,” which I also recall.
Obligatory.
(BTW, I keep reading Janeane as two rhyming syllables: jane-ane. Whose bright idea was that spelling!?!)
Greens’ earliest citation for the exclamation “psych!”* (which it glosses as “fooled you! just kidding!”) is from 1985. It calls it “campus/teen.”
I recently saw (and learned) “psych!” used that way, en passant, tracking down other stuff in “social media”. Christ, TikTok is so annoying.
Our fiend Mike Greene (thegrowlingwolf) loved that Sister Wynona Carr song.
I keep reading Janeane as two rhyming syllables: jane-ane. Whose bright idea was that spelling!?!
Because “jane-ane” wouldn’t boot, I remounted to “Jan-EEN”, with the -ea- as in (Diane) Keaton / KEE-ton.
“psych!”
just to give my 2 cents of confirmation: i’m pretty sure that i remember it in use the early 1980s, when i was in elementary school, and it was certainly marked as black slang, though in the process of being picked up by white kids as well.
baffle you with googlies
which i think falls on the bases chart roughly between “blinding you with science” and “pursuing you with forks and hope”.
I had lots of trouble with the name Diahann Carroll. I just now looked her up and found out that it’s pronounced just like her birth name, Diane.
Well, the entire point of googlies is to be baffling.
Fred Spofforth wasn’t known for any variety of spin bowling, though…
@David E.: I understand that the googly is supposed to, in the moment, baffle the bats[wo]man.* But is it also supposed to baffle the spectators?
*Per wikipedia “officially” renamed the “batter” as of 2021, in a sign of creeping American imperialism.
“psych!”
just to give my 2 cents of confirmation: i’m pretty sure that i remember it in use the early 1980s, when i was in elementary school, and it was certainly marked as black slang, though in the process of being picked up by white kids as well.
About the same in my elementary school c. 1970, though the white majority, at least among boys, used so much black slang you could hardly tell. I do remember black kids gloating with “Psych your mind, booty shine, made you look like Frankenstein.”
The spelling “sike” is spray-painted on the handbasket. However, abandoning the spelling “sycic” for the bridge tactic (making a misleading bid) is fine, since it happened before I was born.
We used „psych!“ in my middle school in the late 1970s in New Hampshire, in an area where there was not a single black family within 50 miles. So clearly the phrase had had time to travel.
Yes, that’s clearly intended, but. I mean.
Stu Clayton: I tried to quote Herodotus 5.92 on “to put loaves in the oven” = “to have penis-in-vagina sex” (cw necromancy, necrophilia)
@Sean: well, in that version you throw in the ingredients and hope for loaves much later. In my version, already finished loaves are repeatedly reheated and removed with nary a thought for the morrow. No biological by-products that one day will whine about wanting to borrow the car on Saturday night.
Necrophilia ? OMG:
#
And in one day he stripped all the wives of the Corinthians of their clothing on account of his own wife Melissa. For when he had sent messengers to the Thesprotians on the river Acheron to ask the Oracle of the dead about a deposit made with him by a guest-friend, Melissa appeared and said she would not tell in what place the deposit was laid, for she was cold and had no clothes, since those which he had buried with her were of no use to her, not having been burnt; and this, she said, would be an evidence to him that she was speaking the truth, namely that when the oven was cold, Periander had put his loaves into it. When the report of this was brought back to Periander, the token made him believe, because he had had commerce with Melissa after she was dead; …
#
Periander had more than one baguette ?!
Wow! I would never trust AI for Latin translations. I still remember my struggles with Latin in high school. Good thing we had paper dictionaries! At least those didn’t make up words… maybe.