Laudator Temporis Acti

See Euripides, Trojan Women 1085 (tr. David Kovacs), for an example of asyndetic, privative adjectives: "Unburied and with no lustral water" (ἄθαπτος ἄνυδρος). The translation obscures the asyndeton.

On deforestation see T.R. Glover, "The Greek and the Forest," pp. 29-50 of his The Challenge of the Greek (New York: Macmillan, 1942).

I have a degree in computer science, and I used to work as a computer programmer. My hero in that field was Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), who once gave these Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering:

• "Gadgets are not necessarily an improvement, vide the succession Blackboard -> Overhead Projector -> PowerPoint."
  
• "And I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist. [Medical researchers are not required to suffer from the diseases they investigate.]"

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Wendell Berry, Woods:

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill:

And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives — the trees, the annual plants, the animals and the birds, the living of all these and the dead — that go and have gone to make the life of the earth. I am less important than I thought. I rejoice in that. My mind loses its urgings, senses its nature, and is free.

Asher Brown Durand, In the Woods
Related posts:

• The Hermitage
  
• Ecotherapy
  
• Misery and Exhilaration

There is nothing elementary about the history of the word elementary, or rather its Latin root elementum. The Oxford Etymologist, Anatoly Liberman, has recently discussed elementum three times, in his Monthly Gleanings for August 2007, October 2007, and November 2007.

Elementum first appears in Lucretius, as a translation of Greek στοιχεῖον (stoicheion), both of which can mean a letter of the alphabet. Liberman rejects the idea that elementum comes from the sequence of letters in the middle of the alphabet, L-M-N. Before reading Liberman, this is the derivation I always thought was correct. I may have learned it in school, or from the confident assertion in Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, p. 145, note: "So elementum is a development from L-M-N-A, l-m-n's (letters of the alphabet), changed to elementa along with other nouns in -men."

In his commentary on Horace, Satires, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Herbig, 1859), pp. 10-11 (on 1.1.26), L.F. Heindorf stated:

Someone acutely derived the etymologically inexplicable word elementa from the sequence of letters L,M,N, as we say the A,B,C's.

Scharfsinnig leitete jemand das etymologisch nicht erklärbare Wort elementa aus der Zusammenstellung der Buchstaben l, m, n her, wie wir sagen das A,B,C.

But he does not say who that "someone" was. Ernst Sittig, "Abecedarium und Elementum," in Satura. Früchte aus dem antiken Welt, Otto Weinreich zum 13. März 1951 dargebracht (Baden-Baden, 1952), pp. 131-138, apparently tried to defend the derivation from L-M-N, but this book is unavailable to me.

Quintilian (1.1.26, tr. H.E. Butler) says:

I quite approve on the other hand of a practice which has been devised to stimulate children to learn by giving them ivory letters [eburneas etiam litterarum formas] to play with, as I do of anything else that may be ways to delight the very young, the sight, handling and naming of which is a pleasure.

Relying on this passage from Quintilian, Hermann Diels, Elementum: Eine Vorarbeit zum griechischen und lateinischen Thesaurus (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1899), derived elementum from *elepantum, which he supposed was a Latin form of Greek ἐλέφας (elephas = elephant, ivory), in the same way that the Romans said Tarentum for Greek Τάρας (Taras), Agrigentum for Ἀκράγας (Akragas), and cilibantum for κιλλίβας (killibas).

Liberman favors a connection between elementa and alimenta:

Elementa (plural) seems to have been an individual coinage prompted by alo ~ olo "nourish," a pun on something "growing" (progressing), as the sequence of letters does in an alphabet.

On this supposed connection see also F.A. Trendelenburg, Elementa logices Aristoteleae, 6th ed. (Berlin: Bethge, 1868), pp. 50-52.

Here are some other discussions of the question which I haven't looked at:

• Leo Meyer, "Elementum," Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen 1 (1877) 86-107
  
• S. Reiter, Zur Etymologie von elementum (Prague, 1900)
  
• W. Vollgraff, "Elementum," Mnemosyne 2 (1949) 89-115
  
• Alfred Adam, "Die sprachliche Herkunft des Wortes Elementum," Novum Testamentum 6 (1963) 229-232

I also haven't been able to consult the standard Latin etymological dictionaries (Ernout-Meillet and Walde-Hoffman).

By the way, Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary." The phrase apparently first occurs in P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith Journalist (1915).

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book II, Chapter 2:

Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.

Dear Michael,

Where the dickends these double entendres take us I don't know but your snatch of Dick-ends perfectissimum suggests the dongtological argument, or is it the intentional phallacy? Who cares?

Here's one from that old prude Henry James:

"'Oh, I can't explain,' cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. 'I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings - it's this.' And he swung his tool." (Roderick Hudson)

There's an article on double entendres in road signs in today's Independent:
http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article3202010.ece

All suggestions regarding prudish alterations to be sent to:

Dr Thomas Bowdler,
69, Gropecunt Lane,
Oxford

Best Wishes,
Peter W.

The authors of the following passages intended them to be understood in only one way. Nevertheless, unintended meanings obtrude themselves, in my imagination at least.

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 24:

She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book I, chapter 7:

...Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers...

Mary Baker Eddy, quoted by Garry Wills in Certain Trumpets (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 178:

Joy in every belfry bell —
Joy for the captive! sound it long!
Ye who have wept four-score can tell
The holy meaning of their dong.

One of the two Letters to Cynthia in Christopher Morley's Mince Pie (1919) is entitled In Praise of Boobs.

William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil:

For a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.

Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle:

Most men would be insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

When he wrote about menial work unworthy of man's divine spark, Thoreau often recurred to the myth of the god Apollo tending the flocks of King Admetus as punishment:

• Letter to Lucy Brown (Sept. 8, 1841): "I, who am going to be a pencil-maker tomorrow, can sympathize with God Apollo, who served King Admetus for a while on earth."
  
• Journal (Aug. 6, 1851): "Ah, yes, even here in Concord horizon Apollo is at work for King Admetus! Who is King Admetus? It is Business, with his four prime ministers Trade and Commerce and Manufactures and Agriculture. And this is what makes mythology true and interesting to us."
• Journal (Sept. 21, 1851): "As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all week, and dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus, its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed. My Pegasus has lost his wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life."
  
• Journal (April 4, 1854): "I am thinking what an elysian day it is, and how I seem always to be keeping the flocks of Admetus such days — that is my luck."

Other Greek myths illustrate the futility of work. I can think of three — the punishments suffered by Sisyphus, the Danaides (daughters of Danaus), and Ocnus in Hades.

Homer, Odyssey 11.593-600 (tr. Butcher and Lang), first mentions Sisyphus:

Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head.

Guercino, Sisyphus
Plato, Gorgias 493 b-c (tr. Benjamin Jowett), first refers to the punishment of carrying water in a sieve:

Some ingenious person, probably a Sicilian or an Italian, playing with the word, invented a tale in which he called the soul—because of its believing and make-believe nature—a vessel, and the ignorant he called the uninitiated or leaky, and the place in the souls of the uninitiated in which the desires are seated, being the intemperate and incontinent part, he compared to a vessel full of holes, because it can never be satisfied. He is not of your way of thinking, Callicles, for he declares, that of all the souls in Hades, meaning the invisible world (aeides), these uninitiated or leaky persons are the most miserable, and that they pour water into a vessel which is full of holes out of a colander which is similarly perforated.

But it is not until [Plato], Axiochus 371 e (tr. George Burges), that this punishment is specifically associated with the Danaides:

But they, whose life has been passed in a course of evil doings, are driven by the Furies to Erebus and Chaos through Tartarus, where is the region of the impious, and the unfilled urns of the daughters of Danaus, and the thirst of Tantalus, and the trials of of Tityus, and the uncompleted stone of Sisyphus,

To whom begins again his labour's end.

Bibliography on the Danaides includes Campbell Bonner, "A Study of the Danaid Myth," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 13 (1902) 129-173, Eva Keuls, Water Carriers in Hades: A Study of Catharsis Through Toil in Classical Antiquity (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1974), and William Hansen, Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 69-75 = "Carrying Water in a Sieve." I have not read any of these.

John William Waterhouse, Danaides
Pausanias 10.29.1 (describing Polygnotus' painting of the underworld, tr. Peter Levi) tells the story of Ocnus:

Behind them is sitting a man who the inscription says is Oknos. He has been painted plaiting a rope, and a she-donkey stands beside him eating the rope as he plaits it. They say this Oknos was an industrious man with an extravagant wife; however much he earned working, she soon spent it.

For more on Ocnus see Friedhelm Hoffmann, Seilflechter in der Unterwelt, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994) 339-346.

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, last chapter of The Elements of Style:

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Let him start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living.

Related posts:

• To Write for Oneself
  
• Soliloquies
  
• Mihi et Musis

Joseph Epstein, 'Let All Your Thinks Be Thanks': An appreciation of an adult holiday, Wall Street Journal (Nov. 22, 2007):

For some time in America we have, of course, been living under Kindergarchy, or rule by children. If children do not precisely rule us, then certainly all efforts, in families where the smallish creatures still roam, are directed to relieving their boredom if not (hope against hope) actually pleasing them.

There is no entry for kindergarchy in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It is a hybrid from German Kinder (children) and Greek archē (power, rule). The medial -g- is reminiscent of kindergarten or oligarchy.

There are some examples of kindergarchy in Google Books. The earliest dates from 1946 and comes from Monatshefte, a magazine published by the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin. The Googlemeisters, alas, have concealed the context behind their "Snippet View."

The OED does recognize paedarchy (1830) and paedocracy (1647), which mean the same thing as kindergarchy.

Hat tip: Patrick Kurp.

Robert Frost, My November Guest:

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Tom Thomson, Northern River
Related posts:

• November (I)
  
• November (II)
  
• November (III)
  
• November (IV)
  
• November (V)

Jonathan Swift, Letter to Alexander Pope (Sept. 29, 1725):

[W]hen you think of the world give it one lash the more at my request. I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them.

Thoreau, Journal (July 26, 1852):

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

Thoreau, Journal (July 27, 1852):

I am sure that if I call for a companion in my walk I have relinquished in my design some closeness of communion with Nature. The walk will surely be more commonplace. The inclination for society indicates a distance from Nature. I do not design so wild and mysterious a walk.

Hilaire Belloc, excerpts from On Cheese, in his book of essays First and Last:

This happy Christendom of ours (which is just now suffering from an indigestion and needs a doctor—but having also a complication of insomnia cannot recollect his name) has been multifarious incredibly—but in nothing more than in cheese!

One cheese differs from another, and the difference is in sweeps, and in landscapes, and in provinces, and in countrysides, and in climates, and in principalities, and in realms, and in the nature of things. Cheese does most gloriously reflect the multitudinous effect of earthly things, which could not be multitudinous did they not proceed from one mind.

Consider the cheese of Rocquefort: how hard it is in its little box. Consider the cheese of Camembert, which is hard also, and also lives in a little box, but must not be eaten until it is soft and yellow. Consider the cheese of Stilton, which is not made there, and of Cheddar, which is. Then there is your Parmesan, which idiots buy rancid in bottles, but which the wise grate daily for their use: you think it is hard from its birth? You are mistaken. It is the world that hardens the Parmesan. In its youth the Parmesan is very soft and easy, and is voraciously devoured.

Then there is your cheese of Wensleydale, which is made in Wensleydale, and your little Swiss cheese, which is soft and creamy and eaten with sugar, and there is your Cheshire cheese and your little Cornish cheese, whose name escapes me, and your huge round cheese out of the Midlands, as big as a fort whose name I never heard. There is your toasted or Welsh cheese, and your cheese of Pont-l'evêque, and your white cheese of Brie, which is a chalky sort of cheese. And there is your cheese of Neufchatel, and there is your Gorgonzola cheese, which is mottled all over like some marbles, or like that Mediterranean soap which is made of wood-ash and of olive oil. There is your Gloucester cheese called the Double Gloucester, and I have read in a book of Dunlop cheese, which is made in Ayrshire: they could tell you more about it in Kilmarnock. Then Suffolk makes a cheese, but does not give it any name; and talking of that reminds me how going to Le Quesnoy to pass the people there the time of day, and to see what was left of that famous but forgotten fortress, a young man there showed me a cheese, which he told me also had no name, but which was native to the town, and in the valley of Ste. Engrace, where is that great wood which shuts off all the world, they make their cheese of ewe's milk and sell it in Tardets, which is their only livelihood. They make a cheese in Port-Salut which is a very subtle cheese, and there is a cheese of Limburg, and I know not how many others, or rather I know them, but you have had enough: for a little cheese goes a long way. No man is a glutton on cheese.

What other cheese has great holes in it like Gruyere, or what other is as round as a cannon-ball like that cheese called Dutch? which reminds me:—

Talking of Dutch cheese. Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in the valley of the Rhine—nay, to some extent in Spain (in her Pyrenean valleys at least)—there flourishes a vast burgeoning of cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient Empire—but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish Channel.

I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.

Nicolaes Gillis (1580-1632)

---

Donald Hall, O Cheese:

In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.

O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.

Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l'Eveque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.

O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.

Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.

O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.

Clara Peeters (1594-1659)

---

Charles Gray wrote Crambo on Cheese after attending a wedding dinner without cheese. Note how every line ends either with the word "cheese" or with a word rhyming with "cheese."

I've dined—but still I'm ill at ease—
For why? my stomach lacks the cheese.
I try its cravings to appease,
But all won't do—I sigh for cheese.
A glass of port, sir?' If you please—
But what is port without the cheese!
The wine of life is on the lees,'
Unless a dinner ends with cheese!
I take a pinch, and loudly sneeze.
Sly madam Echo answers 'Cheese!'
I love a song—am fond of glees—
A song I'll write in praise of cheese.
If fair Miss Sally touch the keys,
To me they vibrate, che, che, cheese!
I'll never sue on bended knees,
To lady fair that spurns at cheese.
The world, in vain, may try to tease
The man that is content with cheese.—
May you, my friend, live at your ease
And never want your bread and cheese:
To Mrs H. a lengthened lease
Of life's good things—including cheese.
Last night she braved the stormy breeze,
Got wet—the Doctor lost the cheese!
I'd rather far that his degrees—
I mean his muckle M's and D's,
Had lost their mark, than we the cheese.
May hungry ruin on him seize,
That stole, and then devoured the cheese;
Long may he feel what drunkard drees,
A burning drouth—sans drink, sans cheese!
Sweeter than honey to wild bees,
Or to the fists of lawyers, fees,
Is port, or porter, after cheese!
At lunch, I give my heart a heeze,
With ale, brown stout, and Cheshire cheese.
Though eld my hair should silvereeze,
There's youth, and truth, in Stilton cheese.
If cold, in winter, make you wheeze,
Then clear your windpipe out with cheese.
For indigestion—sad disease!
What is so good as mouldy cheese?
Ill fares the man that never prees
A rabbit, made of Glos'ter cheese.
Had I, on earth, but four Tarees,
With them I'd buy a pound of cheese;
Or mouths like the twin Siamese,
I'd feed them both with toasted cheese.
Till death life's genial current freeze
My rhymes shall run in praise of cheese.—
Your friendly hand I soon shall squeeze;
Meantime, provide the house with cheese:
I'll drink, while you repeat the threes—
'Hip, hip—hurra! the cheese, the cheese!'
While rivers run to join the seas;
While leaves in spring shall clothe the trees,
And daisies star the verdant leas,
Shall mankind munch their bread and cheese!
Rhymes yet remain, as frieze, and pease,
And C's and G's, and E's and T's;
And twenty more as good as these,
When next I chant, or chime, on cheese.
So having made you my congees,
I drop my crambo-clink on cheese!

Floris van Dijck (1575—1651)

---

I borrowed the title of this blog post from new words written to the old hymn tune "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." The lyrics are in Marcia and Jon Pankake, Joe's Got a Head Like a Ping-Pong Ball: A Prairie Home Companion Song Book (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 12:

What a food we have in cheeses
Mozzarella, cheddar, Swiss
Bleu and Limburger's sweet breezes
Lingering like a lover's kiss
Humble milk's apotheosis
Muenster, Provolone, Brie
Damn cholesterol's thrombosis
Cheese is Gouda stuff by me!

Heed the U.S. Dairy Council
Keep the Gruyère on the shelf
Just a tiny ounce'll
Give you Vitamin B-12
Gather, pilgrims, at the deli
Buying Edam and Havarti
Wedges moist and cold and smelly
Bring home lots and have a party!

Floris van Schooten (1590-1655)

My son and his fiancée recently sent me a package of gifts, and in the package were horehound drops, made by Claey Candy Inc. of South Bend, Indiana. They are supposed to be "soothing to the throat," and I find them so, especially as I'm troubled by a persistent cough now.

The gift also piqued my curiosity about horehound, in particular the etymology of the word and the use of the herb.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the following etymology of horehound:

OE. háre húne, f. hár hoar, hoary + húne name of a plant, of uncertain origin; thence ME. hôrhowne, altered by popular etymology to horehound, which puts some appearance of meaning into the second element. The analogical spelling is hoar-, but this is much less usual in England than hore-.

I haven't seen John A.C. Greppin, "A Note on the Etymology of English Horehound," in Dorothy Disterheft et al., edd., Studies in Honor of Jaan Puhvel, Part 1: Ancient Languages and Philology (Washington, 1997), pp. 71-74. Anatoly Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), scheduled for release on Dec. 21, 2007, supposedly has a detailed discussion of the etymology of horehound.

Let's look at the hoary part of horehound first. Hoar and hoary mean "gray or white with age," and W.W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. hoarhound, cites Johns, Flowers of the Field, for the proposition that horehound got its name because its stem is "covered with white wooley down." But the 17th century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper says that the "crumpled rough leaves" of horehound have "a sullen hoary green colour." Similarly Thoreau, Journal (Oct. 22, 1855), refers to "the pale whitish leaves of horehound," and so perhaps the name arose not from the stem but from the gray-green leaves. The flowers are also white.

Photograph by Kurt Stueber.
As for the OED's statement that popular etymology put "some appearance of meaning into the second element," I wonder if that meaning was helped along by the belief that horehound helped cure dog bites. Culpeper says, "The green leaves bruised, and boiled in old hog's grease into an ointment, healeth the bitings of dogs," and this belief goes back at least as far as Antonius Castor, one of Pliny the Elder's sources for Natural History 20.89 (tr. John Bostock and H.T. Riley): "Beaten up, too, with stale axle-grease and applied topically, he says, horehound is a cure for the bite of a dog."

The scientific name of horehound is Marrubium vulgare. Isidore of Seville (Etymologies, 17.58, tr. Stephen A. Barney) says:

Horehound (marrubium), which the Greeks call πράσιον, is so called because of its bitterness (amaritudo).

There is no connection to amaritudo, but Isidore is probably right that it "is so called because of its bitterness." The consensus is that Latin marrubium is related etymologically to Hebrew marror or maror, the bitter herbs eaten on Passover.

People also make tea and a kind of ale from horehound. Despite its medicinal properties, it is considered a weed in many parts of the world.

At the local public library I recently happened upon Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), and on a whim I checked it out. Browsing through it, I noticed several poems that seemed to be imitations of odes by Horace. Indeed, Hall based his collection The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993) entirely on Horace's first book of odes. Here is Hall's imitation of Horace, Ode 1.11, followed by the Latin original and my pedestrian literal translation.

Camilla, never ask when it will happen, for we'll never know
how it comes or when. Leave divination to Julia, our friend
who orders predestination from catalogues of remaindered
theologies. Let us determine to take what comes, hot or cold,
whether we stay alive into old age or drop dead next Tuesday,
which is doubtless as good a day as any. Tonight let us fill
our wineglasses without fretting about the future, which only
sours the Beaujolais. Forget tomorrow's blueberries; eat today's.

---

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quicquid erit, pati,
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

---

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what final fate the gods have given to me and you, Leuconoe, and don't consult Babylonian horoscopes. How much better it is to accept whatever shall be, whether Jupiter has given many more winters or whether this is the last one, which now breaks the force of the Tuscan sea against the facing cliffs. Be wise, strain the wine, and trim distant hope within short limits. While we're talking, grudging time will already have fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.

Thomas Hardy, The Later Autumn:

Gone are the lovers, under the bush
        Stretched at their ease;
        Gone the bees,
Tangling themselves in your hair as they rush
        On the line of your track,
        Leg-laden, back
        With a dip to their hive
        In a prepossessed dive.

Toadsmeat is mangy, frosted, and sere;
        Apples in grass
        Crunch as we pass,
And rot ere the men who make cyder appear.
        Couch-fires abound
        On fallows around,
        And shades far extend
        Like lives soon to end.

Spinning leaves join the remains shrunk and brown
        Of last year's display
        That lie wasting away,
On whose corpses they earlier as scorners gazed down
        From their aery green height:
        Now in the same plight
        They huddle; while yon
        A robin looks on.

Toadsmeat = toadstools
Couch = couch-grass (Triticum repens)


Caspar David Friedrich, Forest in Late Autumn
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In his essay Wild Apples, Thoreau amused himself by inventing pseudo-scientific monikers for various types of apples:

There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis), also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,—you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed, (gelato-soluta,) good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus viridis);—this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;—the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug-Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue,—Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,—all of them good. As Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,—

Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples."

Charles Asbury Stephens (1844-1931) wrote fiction for children, but the names of apple varieties in this passage from his book When Life was Young at the Old Farm in Maine (Norway, Maine: The Old Squire's Bookstore, 1912), pp. 16-17, do not seem to be fictional:

"I am going to show you the good apple trees," she continued, and led the way through the orchard. "These three great ones, here below the garden wall, are Orange Speck trees; they are real nice apples for winter; and there is the Gilliflower tree. Over here is the Early Sweet Bough; and that big one is the August Sweeting; and out there are the three August Pippins. All those away down there toward the road are Baldwins and Greenings. Those two by the lane wall are None Such trees. Out there by the corn-field wall are four Sweet Harvey trees and next below them, two Georgianas. I learned all their names last year. But this one here by the currant bushes is a Sops-in-wine. Oh, they are so good! and they get ripe early, too, and so do the August Pippins and the Harveys and the August Sweetings; they are all nice."

Most of the apples mentioned by Stephens are attested elsewhere, but I cannot locate any other reference to the Orange Speck apple. Was it an otherwise unknown variety that has now vanished, or was it simply a local name for a better known variety such as Orange Sweet or Cox's Orange Pippin? The children's stories of Charles Asbury Stephens are a generally reliable, if largely untapped, resource for details about 19th century rural life in Maine, and I wonder if the Orange Speck apple was a genuine variety and if other references to it might lurk in the pages of old undigitized magazines and newspapers.

W.M. Munson, Preliminary Notes on the Seedling Apples of Maine = Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 143 (1907), doesn't mention Orange Speck. Unfortunately I don't have access to George Albert Stilphen, The Apples of Maine: A Compilation of the History, Physical and Cultural Characteristics of all the Varieties of Apples Known to Have Been Grown in the State of Maine (Bolster's Mills/Harrison, Me.: Stilphen's Crooked River Farm, 1993; rpt. 2000) or its predecessor Frederick Charles Bradford, Apple varieties in Maine, Thesis (M.S.) in Agriculture, University of Maine, 1911.

A story entitled "The Stranger Guest" appeared as Chapter XXII of Charles Asbury Stephens, Haps and Mishaps at The Old Farm (Norway, Maine: The Old Squire's Bookstore, 1925), pp. 219-227. Guess who the stranger guest is from this excerpt:

About eight o'clock they heard a knock at the side door. On opening it the old squire dimly perceived a stranger—a medium-sized man, wearing a cap and jacket and carrying a stout stick in his hand.

"Good evening, sir!" the old squire said, peering out at him. "What's wanted?"

The stranger asked whether they could entertain him for the night. "I am taking a long walk," he added, "and I can find no tavern."

"I guess we will try to put you up," the old squire replied. "Are you alone?"

"Alone and afoot," the stranger replied dryly. "Perhaps I ought to tell you before I come in that I've been in jail once."

"That so?" the old squire said. "Well, step inside here, and let me have a look at you."

The stranger entered and stood just within the doorway, perfectly still, with a curious smile on his face, but without speaking, as the old squire brought a lamp.

"You don't look like a very bad man, and rogues are not likely to tell of their being in jail," the old squire remarked, with a smile. "Excuse me for asking, but what's your business in these parts?"

"Stealing apples," the odd visitor replied.

"How do you get them away, without a team?" the old squire inquired skeptically.

"I don't get them away," the stranger said. "I merely bite them and throw them down. I'm only after the flavor. I bite only natural fruit, mostly apples growing wild by the roadsides or in pastures. Grafts I don't care for. Natural fruit has the fine flavors."

"Just so," the old squire rejoined, amused, but with some misgivings as to the fellow's sanity.

If you guessed Thoreau, you're right.

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Henry David Thoreau, Travelling:

If e'er our minds are ill at ease
It is in vain to cross the seas
Or when the fates do prove unkind
To leave our native land behind.
The ship becalmed at length stands still
The steed will rest beneath the hill.
But swiftly still our fortunes pace
To find us out in every place.

There is a longer version, with the first two lines omitted, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Monday):

Though all the fates should prove unkind,
Leave not your native land behind.
The ship, becalmed, at length stands still;
The steed must rest beneath the hill;
But swiftly still our fortunes pace
To find us out in every place.

The vessel, though her masts be firm,
Beneath her copper bears a worm;
Around the cape, across the line,
Till fields of ice her course confine;
It matters not how smooth the breeze,
How shallow or how deep the seas,
Whether she bears Manilla twine,
Or in her hold Madeira wine,
Or China teas, or Spanish hides,
In port or quarantine she rides;
Far from New England's blustering shore,
New England's worm her hulk shall bore,
And sink her in the Indian seas,
Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.

The germ of this idea appears in Horace, Epistles 1.11.27: "They who run across the sea get a change of sky but not of mind." (caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.)

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Dear Mr.Gilleland,

Thanks for the entertaining snatch of dialogue from Petrarch. Christopher Robinson's Lucian does happen to be among my librorum copia so I can confirm what the top of your head told you; the first Latin translations of Lucian didn't appear until a decade or two after Petrarch's death. The last section you quote ("Multos in vinculis tenes, qui si forsan erumperent ...") reminds me of the library of Petrarch himself — a very reluctantly ignorant book-collector where Greek was concerned. His manuscripts of Plato and Homer were among his most treasured possessions but unintelligible to him — literally "in vinculis", the litterae, those deltas, thetas, rhos and omegas like so many links in a chain. He had the Hellenophone Calabrian monk Leontius Pilatus translate some of the Homer for him. Petrarch must have had just a smattering of Greek himself. How much can you learn in a summer (he had an intensive course in Avignon in 1342)?

He begins his letter to Homer (1360): "I have long desired to address you in writing, and would have done so without hesitation if I had had a ready command of your language. But alas! Fortune was unkind to me in my study of Greek." There's also a letter to Boccaccio (August 18th 1360) on the subject of the Homer translation: "Had Fate smiled more kindly upon me when I entered upon the student's career, and had not death so untimely overtaken my illustrious teacher, I should today, perhaps, have something more than a rudimentary knowledge of Greek." His teacher, another Italo-Greek, Barlaam of Calabria died of the plague, and Pilatus was killed by a bolt of lightning on his way back from Constantinople to Venice, where Petrarch was eagerly awaiting the arrival of more manuscripts he'd no hope of being able to read. Bad luck all round.

Best Regards,

Peter Watson