Here’s one that I strangely got in trouble for in 1999, back at BYU.  I was assigned to translate a poem of Catullus for a class I was taking.  Catullus was a teen pop star back in Rome, a useless socialite with a dirty mouth and no social skills.  But he wrote poetry that people made copies of, and the works with the most copies survive, independent of quality.  Okay, so that being said, this was Catullus’ poem #58b, which is basically a shout-out to his friend.

Non custos si fingar ille Cretum

non si Pegaseo ferar volatu

non Ladas ego pinnipesue Perseus

non Rhesi nivease citaeque bigae

adde huc plumpipedas volatilesque

ventorumque simul require cursum

quos iunctos Cameri mihi dicares

defessus tamen omnibus medullis

et multis languaoribus peresus

essem te mihi amice quaeritando

Traditional English (what the professor was expecting):

Not if I should be molded in brass like the fabled warder of Crete,

Nor though I could soar aloft like the flying Pegasus,

Neither if I were Ladas, or the wing-footed Perseus,

Not if I had the swift snow-white team of Rhesus,

add to these the feather-footed and the winged,

and with them call for the swiftness of the winds,

though you should harness all these, Camerius, and press them into my service,

yet I should be tired out to my very marrow,

and worn away with frequent faintness,

my friend, while searching for you.

My thought, as a school teacher, was that what would make this poem inaccessible to a student wouldn’t be the Latin as much as the allusions.  A proper translation would require translating the punk-speak as well as finding correlative allusions.  So, as you’ll see below, I took the 50 foot tall statue that comes to life when needed and replaced him with the Terminator!  That being said, see below.

Man, I’ve been hunting you like The Rock on a Teletubbie, like T2 on a Pikachu;

If I had Nike Shox and you had crutches,

if I could fly like Tony-Hawk-2-on-an-XBox-with-a-Pentium4 and you were Officer Dick without cheat codes,

if I hired Morpheus and Neo to use terraserver, google, and The Matrix to find you,

if I opened-up a can of Waterboy whoop-ass on your sister every time she didn’t give you a message,

if I were Anakin, Pod Racer, and you were Princess Mario Kart,

if I were a recording industry lawyer and you were a helpless old lady,

if I were Karl Malone and you were Greg Ostertag,

and if your pager screamed my name like your mom did last night,

I still couldn’t get a hold of you.

I know, that line at the end is totally inappropriate, but so was Catullus.  Actually, it turned out the professor didn’t catch any of the references, called it “not a translation,” and made me redo it in a traditional way.  Out of indignance, I redid it, but then wrote up 5 pages of explanations of each allusion in this version.

Again, this was 1999, so much of that would have to be updated in the same way so that modern students would understand it. Your average junior high student has never heard of Greg Ostertag or the terraserver, and might take “Pentium 4″ to mean slow! (XBoxes were 733 Mhz Pentium IIIs in those days…)

Please tell me where you quote this, because I’ve had fun over the years seeing it requoted…

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“O civile si ergo! Fortibus es in aro. O nobili demis trux. Watis inem? Causand dux.”
(with many variations, including “fortibus es in ero.”)

It’s actually an example of Dog Latin.  Dog Latin is when you write fake Latin that has a double entendre to the reader or hearer.  It’s the equivalent of your pretending to speak Spanish by putting the letter O at the end of every English word.  So when Harry Potter wants the lantern to ignite, he doesn’t just say “fiat lux (let there be light).”  Instead, the author lined up a bunch of related phrases, and then made them pretty–she turned the Latin into Latinate, or Dog Latin; from “fiat lux” to “fiat lumen (let there be brightness)” to “Lumos!”  This not only makes the phrase pretty, but often adds a double meaning to the audience.  So when Harry Potter wanted the monster to appear funny to his friends, he didn’t say exactly what Caesar would have said–no, he said “Riddikulus!”, which as a word is not only Latinate but has such a strong cognate that English audiences who don’t know Latin still think it’s a cool world.  (Plus of course it’s pretty looking/sounding, and makes the few who catch both meanings feel smart!)

Okay, so now for the punchline:

“O sibili si ergo! Fortibus es in aro. O nobili demis trux. Watis inem? Causand dux.”

Oh, see, Billy!  See her go!  Forty buses in a row!  Oh, no, Billy!  Them is trucks!  What is in them?  Cows and ducks!”

Now don’t you feel stupid?!  Well, you won’t once you make all your friends look stupider by passing it out to them!  And eventually you’ll all drown your embarassment in a good old fashioned proud-geek tee shirt, and drown that embarassment in a big salary a few years down the road, with help of your Latin tutor (who also went to MBA school.)

Before we close up, here’s some more Dog Latin you see around town.  Have fun with each, and link ‘em back to this page!

• Draco Malfoy (wrongdoing dragon, plus a third reference to Draco, the Hammurabi-ish Lawgiver)
• Voldemort (death-lover)
• Naughtius Maximus (from Monty Python)
• Venom (from Spider Man)
• Accelerati Incredibus (from Looney Tunes)
• Carnivorous Vulgaris (from Looney Tunes)
• Semper ubi sububi
• Computator (or any other NeoLatin, from when we need words that don’t exist)
• Carpe __________ (anything other than “diem”)
• Cogito ergo__________ (anything other than “sum”)
• Reductio ad Hitlerum (a logical device you hear constantly, where someone says “you believe ________, well so did Hitler/Saddam/Osama/etc. [therefore your belief must be inherently wrong]).
• Lorem ipsum (all “greeking”, including “foo music” or “fortibus es” or “o sibili si ergo”.  Feel free to use any of them.)
• Brutus ad sum iam forte, Caesar aderat, Brutus sic in omnibus, Caesar sic in at

Please leave more examples in the comments box below as you see them, and you will!