Anglicisms

Hispanophone purists are probably concerned about the creep of English into their language; one never sees signs in New York for alquilar (the textbook word I learned for "to rent"), but instead only rentar or renta.  I've heard that carro (= "car" + o) for automobile is used occasionally, and I was especially surprised to see today that someone had turné a paper over to someone else--that is "turned" it over (the word is apparently the 1st-person preterite of turnar = "turn" + infinitive ending -ar).  

But all these words, even if they are adoptions of common and useful English words, seem to have healthy precedents in literary Spanish.  Renta and rentar, carro, and turnar can be found in the official dictionary of the Academia Real Espanola, the royal and more-or-less official source for the Spanish language.  European languages have such broad vocabularies, and they all betray the influence of the same Latin words.

Dirty words and the "bunny" problem

You can now tell your friends that you know a dirty word in ancient Greek.  Apparently, in sophisticated writing the Greeks would never use βινέω (bin-AY-o).  In use (as opposed to the dictionary entry) it was βινῶ, (bin-OH), "I fuck."

As you might imagine, the dictionaries of ancient Greek have really lightened up about βινέω in the last century or so.  The 19th-century Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek lexicon defines it with Latin plus a gentle explanation: "inire, coïre, [go in, unite] of illicit intercourse," and the Chantraine Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque (1984-90) adds the more literal Latin futuere.  (For Latin dirty words, see J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary.)  Today, the new ancient-Greek dictionary the Diccionario Griego-Espanol is wonderfully straightforward, defining the word with the infinitive joder, which is also what a Spaniard will say when he stubs his toe.  The DGE contains several excellent quotes such as ὅστις γε πίνειν οἶδε καὶ βινεῖν μόνον, "he only knows how to drink and fuck,"1 and ἥδιστον εστιν ἀποθανεῖν βινοῦνθ᾽ ἅμα, "it is pleasantest to die fucking at the same time."2  The DGE translates the (imperfect-tense) passive form of βινέω as mariconeaba, which I gather means "he was being fucked in the ass."  

The ancient Athenians themselves sometimes softened βινέω for public consumption to κινέω (kin-AY-oh), which usually means "to move."  The LSJ uses "sens. obsc." (sense obscure) for this euphemism, while the etymological dictionary notes the sens erotique.  Moving from β to κ to soften the impact on sensitive ears may have a parallel in the move from "coney" to "bunny" in English to refer to a rabbit.  It's an interesting coincidence.  The Oxford English Dictionary and etymological dictionaries of English all say that "bunny" is a familiarization of "bun" to refer to the animal, based on the little "bun" tail it has.  Hardly anyone now uses "coney" for rabbits.  Yet there is an internet rumor, which has occasionally made it into print, that "bunny" became popular when the earlier word "coney" came (with a vowel shift) to sound very much like "cunny"--the female pudenda.  I have not been able to find evidence for this happening; the printed evidence for it is speculative.  One day I'll look more closely at how the senses developed.

1. HOS-tis geh PINein OY-deh kai bin-EIN MON-on; Aristophanes, Frogs, line 740.
2. HEY-distohn estin apothanEIN binOONT HAMa; fragment 6 of the work of the comic poet Philetaeros

Hard work

"Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or equation, he would switch over to verse, and vice versa."

--Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, trans. Michael Kandel

Gems from the ancients

One of the statutes of Numa, from Rome in 7th century B.C., is translated at the link as

"If a man is killed by a thunderbolt the proper burial ritual shall not be performed."  

Because, of course, Zeus wished the man dead and had a good reason for it.

The Greek Aristophanes, in a lost comedy called Daitales, refers to one of a pair of brothers as ὁ σώφρων, "the clever." The other is ὁ καταπύγων, "the one who takes it in the ass." C. Murphy, "Aristophanes and the Art of Rhetoric," Harv. St. in Classical Phil. 49:69, 71 (1938).

Inappropriate description

I'm taking a few classes in dead languages at Columbia University, and reading much more literary analysis by Classics and English department academics.  I read in Frederick Ahl, "Form Empowered: Lucan's Pharsalia" (in Boyle, ed. Roman Epic), p. 137:

"[Roman poet ]Lucan's moral symbol, [the Stoic philosopher] Cato, shares rhetorical ground with the shrewdly apolitical Christ . . ." 

Yes, that Christ.  Regardless of whether Christ was apolitical or not (I don't think he was) referring to the putative Messiah as "shrewd" and "apolitical" is an instance of tapinosis, unintentionally belittling one's subject with descriptive terminology.

Funerals

"circumpotatio . . . must be calqued on περίδειπνον, which must originally have meant a meal consumed with the corpse placed in the middle [citing Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopaedie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft] as an Irish wake used to be (and perhaps still is)"  (Edward Courtney, Archaic Latin Prose (1999) p 25).

A calque is a word-for-word translation from another language for the same term, rather than importing the word in the original.  So circum = περί = "around" and potatio = "drinking-bout" and δείπνον = "meal."

Attorneys, lawyers, etc.

My current research is on terminology for attorneys.  Because each American state or other jurisdiction has a "unified bar," all legal practitioners are called by the same term.  Most commonly, Americans use lawyer or attorney, or the more lengthy attorney-at-law.  They might be called counsel for the purposes of elegant variation, or be named counsellor-at-law in their own letterheads or on the outside of an envelope.  Attorney-at-law, sounding fancy, is used this way too.")  Lawyers can be called advocates too, but so can non-lawyers.  I favor "lawyer," because it's a very plain word and it means what it says.

England does not have a unified bar.  There are solicitors, who do most of the day-to-day practice like contracts, wills, and so on; for court cases they will hire barristers to represent their clients in court.  In the research for a paper I'm doing, I've uncovered a whole catalog of less-well-known names for practitioners of law.  These are mostly from Bouvier's Law Dictionary (2d ed. 1843 and "Third Revision," 1914) and from Noah Webster's dictionaries of 1828 and later.

Advocate--a general name for a lawyer, but in Scotland the members of the profession are so called and are members of the Faculty of Advocates.


Apprentice: According to Frederic W. Maitland barristers were called "apprentices" in the middle ages.

"The bar"--used to refer to lawyers while they are pleading in court, referring to their proximity to the physical "bar" that separates judge and lawyers from spectators in the courtroom.

Civilian--a prominent expert in the civil law (there's apparently no "commoners" practicing the common law).

Doctor--presumably the title for a member of the College of Doctors, practitioners before British ecclesiastical courts in the eighteenth century.  Having the juris doctor degree doesn't really entitle an American attorney to be called "doctor."   You might say he'd be laughed out of court if he assumed the title.

Esquire--a very fraught title, placed after a lawyer's name when addressing him in writing or, more frequently nowadays, used by the lawyer himself. 

Jurist--an academic who holds forth on the law; a judge; or, perhaps more jokingly, any lawyer.

Notary--a professional in civil law jurisdictions who handles various matters focused on legal documents, especially in real estate.

Proctor--a practitioner in ecclesiastical courts.

Serjeant-at-law--an earlier term for barrister.