Sunday, August 23, 2020
On Measuring Beavers
Richard Tarrant, Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 11:
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Finally, I cannot resist mentioning a slip for which I was responsible when editing the Canadian classical journal Phoenix. The Spring 1980 issue included a review of the edition of a text on military surveying, De metatione castrorum ('On measuring camps'). In typing up the table of contents, I rendered the title as De metatione castorum, which could mean either 'On measuring chaste men' or 'On measuring beavers'. An alert reader who adopted the second interpretation wrote to congratulate me on perpetrating such a quintessentially Canadian error.
