Monday, June 05, 2006
Dryasdust
Terry Lindvall, Surprised by Laughter: The Comic World of C.S. Lewis (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996), p. 216, discussing names suited to occupations in Prince Caspian:
Pulverulentus Siccus, author of Grammatical garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open'd to Tender Wits, is a sly Latin equivalent of Dr. Jonas Dryasdust, the fictitious character to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated some of his novels.
Dryasdust would be a good name for a pedantic, nit-picking blog (like this one).
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A deadly dull Telmarine academic author is named Pulverulentus Siccus, a sly Latin equivalent of the words dust, slow, and dry.So far as I know, the suffix -lentus in pulverulentus has nothing to do with the adjective lentus (pliant, flexible; slow, sluggish). See Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, § 245:
Adjectives meaning full of, prone to, are formed from noun-stems with the suffixes — -ōsus, -lēns, -lentus.Examples from which English words are derived include corpulentus, crapulentus, fraudulentus, opulentus, somnulentus, truculentus, and turbulentus.
Pulverulentus Siccus, author of Grammatical garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open'd to Tender Wits, is a sly Latin equivalent of Dr. Jonas Dryasdust, the fictitious character to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated some of his novels.
Dryasdust would be a good name for a pedantic, nit-picking blog (like this one).
