Quam puer coactusque, linguam Latinam cognovi

[ndrosen]

At the supermarket this afternoon, specifically at a self-checkout station, I noticed that the woman at the next station, accompanied by her daughter, was wearing sandals that let her feet be seen, and she had “Carpe diem” tattooed on each foot.

I finished checking out first; as she was putting items in her bag, she turned toward me, and I seized the opportunity to say to her, “Carpe diem, matrona honorata. Loquerisne Latine?”

She laughed, and said that “Carpe diem” was about all that she knew.

If she had turned out to be fluent in Latin, I would have had to admit that my ability to speak the language is quite limited.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

"Carpe Diem" is an old feline motto meaning "give us this day our daily fish."

[jsburbidge]

Sometime back in the 1990s I was walking along at work when I passed a colleague I knew vaguely wearing a T-shirt with ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη blazoned across it. When I stopped dead and read it out, they said that I was the first person they knew who could tell them what it said. I accordingly identified it as the first line of the Odyssey. They had clearly acquired it, or been given it by a relative, as a souvenir with no idea of its meaning. My own view was that it was brave to the point of foolhardy to be wearing something one didn't know the meaning of ...