Laudator Temporis Acti

Maurice Baring (1874-1945), The Puppet Show of Memory (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1923), pp. 89-90 (at Eton):

In the evenings the Lower boys did their work in pupil room. Boys in fifth form, when they were slack, did the same as a punishment, and this was called penal servitude. While they prepared their lessons or did their verses, my tutor would be taking older boys in what was called private; this in our case meant special lessons in Greek. One night these older boys were construing Xenophon, and a boy called Rashleigh could not translate the phrase, "Τοὺς πρὸς ἐμὲ λέγοντας."¹ My tutor repeated it over and over again, and then appealed to us Lower boys. I knew what it meant, but when I was asked I repeated exactly what Rashleigh had said, like one hypnotised, much to my tutor's annoyance.

Sometimes when my tutor was really annoyed he would say: "Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think what a ghastly fool you are?" Another time he said to a boy: "You've no more manners than a cow, and a bad cow, too." When the word δύναμαι occurred in Greek, my tutor made a great point of distinguishing the pronunciation of δύναμαι and δυνάμει. δύναμαι he pronounced more broadly. When we read out the word δύναμαι we made no such distinction, and he used to say, "Do you mean dunamy or dunamai?" It was our great delight to draw this expression from him, and whenever the word δύναμαι occurred we were careful to accent the last syllable as slightly as possible. It never failed.

¹ I have looked up the reference and miraculously found it. My memory after thirty-three years is correct. The phrase occurs in Xenophon's Anabasis, Book II.v.27.