Laudator Temporis Acti

Wendell Berry, What Are People For? Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 190:

Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.

Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica I, vi:

Secondly, Men that adore times past, consider not that those times were once present, that is, as our own are at this instant, and we our selves unto those to come, as they unto us at present; as we relye on them, even so will those on us, and magnifie us hereafter, who at present condemn our selves. Which very absurdity is daily committed amongst us even in the esteem and censure of our own times. And to speak impartially, old men from whom we should expect the greatest example of wisdome, do most exceed in this point of folly; commending the daies of their youth they scarce remember, at least well understood not; extolling those times their younger years have heard their fathers condemn, and condemning those times the gray heads of their posterity shall commend. And thus is it the humour of many heads to extol the daies of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickednesse of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomly doe, without the borrowed help and satyres of times past; condemning the vices of their times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both. Horace therefore, Juvenall and Persius were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times. There is a certain list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all Authors, which will last as long as human nature; or digested into common places may serve for any theme, and never be out of date untill Dooms day.

Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd edition (New York: Facts on File, 2004), p. 215, s.vv. do it while standing on one foot:

This Americanism means to do something easily and quickly, to encapsulate or describe it with little effort, as in "She explained her theory to reporters while standing on one foot."

This sort of expression isn't confined to American speech. It is thousands of years old, at least. Horace, Satires 1.4.9-10, wrote concerning Lucilius:

In an hour he used to dictate two hundred verses (as a great feat), standing on one foot.

                                  in hora saepe ducentos,
ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno.

Arthur Palmer ad loc. says that stans pede in uno is "a proverbial expression for doing anything with facility," but he gives no parallels.

The expression also occurs in the Talmud, tractate Shabbat 31a (tr. Michael L. Rodkinson):

Another Gentile came to Shamai saying: "Convert me on the condition that thou teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot." Shamai pushed him away with the builders' measure he held in his hand. He thereupon came to Hillel, and the latter accepted him. He told him: "What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow; this is the whole law. All the rest is a commentary to this law; go and learn it."

Laura Gibbs at Bestiaria Latina Blog continues her series of word histories, with posts on innuendo, reticule, and prayer.

Concerning prayer, she writes:

It is always interesting to see when words, especially fundamental words, in a religious vocabulary are borrowed from another language, as opposed to finding some kind of native equivalent.

Actually there was a native English equivalent for prayer, but it was ousted by the Latinate word. See Ernest Weekley, The Romance of Words (1911), chapter 6:

A part of our Anglo-Saxon church vocabulary was supplanted by Latin or French words. Thus Anglo-Sax. ge-bed, prayer, was gradually expelled by Old Fr. preiere (prière), Lat. precaria. It has survived in beadsman--

"The beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold."
                    (KEATS, Eve of St Agnes.)--

beadroll and bead, now applied only to the humble device employed in counting prayers.

Cf. German Gebet = prayer. For an example of gebed, see Luke 6.12 (Vulgate erat pernoctans in oratione Dei, Old English Wæs wacigende on Godes gebéde, modern English [He] continued all night in prayer to God, German Er blieb über Nacht in dem Gebet zu Gott).

Another English word connected with praying is patter. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the derivation:

"talk rapidly," c.1400, from pater "mumble prayers rapidly" (c.1300), shortened form of paternoster (q.v.).

Pater noster are the opening words of the Lord's Prayer in Latin (Our Father).

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Update: More on this subject at Bestiaria Latina Blog.

From a comment on a post at Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective:

I think learning to read Greek is pretty simple. It could be done in a couple of hours.

Articles by Theodore Dalrymple:

• Matters of Madness Come Barking Back
  
• Growing Up British
  
• The Murderer Next Door

In the first article, Dalrymple comments on beards:

I suspect, though of course I cannot prove, that he [David Cooper] owed much of his success to his appearance, which was that of a rock star turned Old Testament prophet. How could someone with such a beard be other than profound? Tolstoy, Rasputin and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi played the same trick. It seems to work every time.

Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997):

P. 278:

A quip by a local wit began circulating: "When Brahms is feeling really frisky, he sings The Grave Is My Joy."

P. 372:

Brahms managed rehearsals with incomparable musicianship and ready wit. He knew how to be self-deprecating, as when he echoed the town's (and probably his own) favorite joke about himself: "I'm in a really good mood today, so let's do Dear Lord, When Shall I Die?"

Dennis Lehane, Sacred (1997), chapter 1:

"When you were born," she said, "I bet your father held you up to your mother and said, 'Look, hon, you just gave birth to a beautiful crabby old man.'"

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Update: Sauvage Noble translates this into Latin and Tagalog.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, chapter 31:

After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong)--no history, no tradition, no poetry--nothing that can give it even a passing interest. What may be left of General Grant's great name forty centuries hence? This--in the Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868, possibly:

"URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT--popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote 'Rock me to Sleep, Mother.'"

These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.

Books enchant bibliomaniacs by their outward appearance, as well as by their contents. Some things that delight me when I encounter them in books are thumb indices, interleaving, and ribbon bookmarks.

A thumb index is the series of notches on the fore edge of a book, designed to assist the reader in finding a particular section. Each notch ends in a tab, with a guiding letter or two. Bibles and dictionaries sometimes have a thumb index.

Interleaving is the insertion of blank pages between the pages of a printed book by the binder, to allow the reader to make his own notes. Interleaving is not very common, but is sometimes found in dictionaries. I own only one interleaved book, Henry W. Auden's Greek Prose Phrase Book (London: Macmillan, 1963).

The books in the Library of America series have nice ribbon bookmarks sewn into the spines. I own only a few books in this handsome series, Francis Parkman's France and England in North America and Thoreau's Collected Essays and Poems.

The Maverick Philosopher reminds us of the proverb "Barba non facit philosophum, neque vile gerere pallium" (A beard does not a philosopher make, nor does wearing a shabby cloak). I once tried to trace the source of this proverb, without much success.

I recently happened on some poems from the Greek Anthology (tr. W.R. Paton) which mock beards, especially beards on the faces of philosophers.

11.156 (Ammianus):

Do you suppose that your beard creates brains and therefore you grow that fly-flapper? Take my advice and shave it off at once; for that beard is a creator of lice and not of brains.

11.157 (Ammianus):

"Good Sir" and "Can it be?" and "Whence, sirrah, and whither?" and "Right off" and "Go to" and "Quite so" and "Hie ye" and cloakie and little lock and beardie, and "Keep your shoulder bare" -- that is what present-day philosophy flourishes on.

11.158 (Antipater):

The wallet laments, and the fine sturdy Heracles club of Sinopian Diogenes, and the double coat, foe of the cold clouds, befouled all over with encrusted dirt, lament likewise because they are polluted by your shoulders. Verily I take Diogenes himself to be the dog of heaven, but thou art the dog that lies in the ashes. Put off, put off the arms that are not thine. The work of lions is one thing, and that of bearded goats another.

11.368 (Julian Antecessor):

You have such a heavy crop on your hairy face that you ought to have it cut with scythes and not with scissors.

11.430 (Lucian):

If you think that to grow a beard is to acquire wisdom, a goat with a fine beard is at once a complete Plato.

If I'm not mistaken, the Maverick Philosopher once sported a stylish beard. Whether he still does so in his desert retreat, I don't know.

For a magnificent set of whiskers, look here.

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Laura Gibbs writes:

Here's a rhyming medieval Latin one - it's about saints, not philosophers, but it's the same idea!

Si omnis barbatus
foret in orbe beatus,
in mundi circo
non esset sanctior hirco.

I've got all kinds of fun goat proverbs here: http://bestlatin.net/zoo/caper.htm.

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E.J. Moncada writes:

The proverb (Re: Beards and Philosophers) you report trying to trace down may be a Latin version of a remark by Plutarch (Mor. 352 C): "...having a beard and wearing a coarse cloak does not make a philosopher." Of course this does precious little about locating the Latin.

Plutarch's remark occurs in the treatise on Isis and Osiris. According to L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 154, Guillaume Budé published a Latin translation of three treatises of Plutarch into Latin in 1505. Reynolds and Wilson don't say which treatises. In 1560-1570 Guilielmus Xylander (i.e. Wilhelm Holtzman) published a complete Latin translation of Plutarch, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Gypsy Scholar:

Milton is not averse to using even pagan myth to illuminate a crucial point.

Here are a few examples from Paradise Lost.

5.285-287 (angel Raphael compared to Hermes):

                              Like Maia's son he stood,
And shook his plumes, that heav'nly fragrance filled
The circuit wide.

5.377-383 (Eve compared to Aphrodite):

                              So to the sylvan lodge
They came, that like Pomona's arbor smiled,
With flow'rets decked, and fragrant smells; but Eve,
Undecked, save with herself, more lovely fair
Than wood-nymph, or the fairest goddess feigned
Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove,
Stood to entertain her guest from Heav'n.

11.8-14 (Adam and Eve compared to Deucalion and Pyrrha):

                              Yet their port
Not of mean suitors, nor important less
Seemed their petition, than when th' ancient pair
In fables old, less ancient yet than these,
Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore
The race of mankind drowned, before the shrine
Of Themis stood devout.

11.129-133 (cherubim compared to Janus and Argus):

                              With him the cohort bright
Of watchful Cherubim; four faces each
Had, like a double Janus, all their shape
Spangled with eyes more numerous than those
Of Argus, and more wakeful than to drowse,
Charmed with Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reed
Of Hermes, or his opiate rod.

11.184-186 (eagle called bird of Jove):

                              Nigh in her sight
The bird of Jove, stooped from his aery tow'r,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove.

11.240-244 (Michael the Archangel's vest dyed by Iris):

                              Over his lucid arms
A military vest of purple flowed,
Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain
Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old
In time of truce; Iris had dipt the woof.

The Fib.

W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (1930), chapter 1:

The first date in English History is 55 BC (for the other date see Chapter 11, William the Conqueror), in which year Julius Caesar (the memorable Roman Emperor) landed, like all other successful invaders of these islands, at Thanet. This was in the Olden Days, when the Romans were top nation on account of their classical education, etc.

Julius Caesar advanced very energetically, throwing his cavalry several thousands of paces over the River Flumen; but the Ancient Britons, though all well over military age, painted themselves true blue, or woad, and fought as heroically under their dashing queen, Woadicea, as they did later in thin red lines under their good queen, Victoria.

Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 BC, not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes, and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, 'Veni, Vidi, Vici', which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly.

The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, understanding him to have called them 'Weeny, Weedy, and Weaky', lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts.

The opening sentence of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is:

Dear son: I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors.

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I recently obtained a little anecdote about my paternal grandfather Roy Gilleland, in an email from a gentleman writing a book about the Russian Railway Service Corps, in which my grandfather served:

When he joined the RRSC he listed at 5' 11" and 185 lbs. with a scar on his left clavicle caused by a bullet wound (the bullet could then still be felt, reported his medical history).

My grandfather died before I was born, so I never got the chance to feel the bullet and ask him about it.

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My distant cousin David Vermette has a web site on Franco-American and Québécois History and Genealogy, with much information on the town where I was born, Brunswick, Maine. His article on Naturalization and Leadership in the Franco-American Community at Brunswick, Maine mentions my ancestor François-Xavier Paiement, who became a U.S. citizen on August 23, 1882, sponsored by another one of my ancestors, Philibert Racine.

But I was especially interested in Vermette's article on Ku Klux Klan Activity in Brunswick, Maine. By 1924, there were 50,000 Klan members in Maine, out of a population of less than a million. The target of their hatred was not primarily black folks (so rare in Maine that I never even saw a black person until I was a teenager), but Catholics and Jews. In Brewer, Maine, where I grew up, our parish priest Father Moriarty recalled Ku Klux Klan marchers throwing rocks through the rectory windows. Our local Catholic high school was named John Bapst, after a Jesuit priest who was tarred and feathered on June 5, 1851, in Ellsworth, Maine, before the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Finally a little anecdote about myself, prompted by Dave Haxton's memories of his military induction physical exam:

After this they marched us into a large room and told us to form rows. Once we were aligned in ranks, the doctor at the front of the room ordered us to drop our drawers, bend over and grab our ankles. The last thing we saw on the way down was an orderly handing the doctor a box of latex gloves ...

My recollection is almost identical. I "won" number 36 in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War, allowed my student deferment to lapse, and was called in for a physical. They must have found something wrong with me, because I was never drafted.

I recall one other detail about my physical. The doctor asked me what I was studying at university, and I said Latin. He then proceeded to recite a poem by Catullus, with flawless Latin pronunciation. That gave me a slightly different perspective on the United States military.

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I hope that my son, the only member of my family who reads this blog, has enjoyed these little anecdotes about his ancestors.

All My Road Before Me. The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1991), p. 453 (February 17, 1927):

To Corpus in the evening to read the Theaetetus with Hardie and his three pupils Erskine, Green and Shewring. All very good fellows. Discovered in Liddell and Scott the glorious word "porwizzle".

The online Liddell and Scott at Perseus is unavailable at this time of the day (as it usually is). Google returns no hits for porwizzle. It doesn't look like a Greek word, and I checked all headwords starting with por- in the little Liddell without finding anything. The Oxford English Dictionary is temporarily accepting free searches, but turns up nothing. I don't own a copy of Plato's Theaetetus in the original Greek, and the online copy at Perseus is also unavailable at the moment.

One would expect to find an odd-sounding word like porwizzle not in Liddell but in the works of Liddell family friend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland was written for Liddell's daughter Alice.

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Laura Gibbs writes:

Do you think it could be a variant of porwiggle, or tadpole, since there is a reference to a tadpole (Greek gurinos) in the dialogue at 161d - the variants for this word listed in the OED [s.v. polliwog] are NUMEROUS:

Forms: α. 5 polwygle, 7 porwig(g)le, 9 porriwiggle, purwiggy, pollywiggle, pollywoggle. β. 6 polwigge, 7 polewigge, po(o)lwig, 9 polliwig, polly-wig, polliwog, pollywog. [ME. polwygle, f. POLL n.1 + WIGGLE v. The forms polwig, etc., are either shortened from polwygle, or formed with the dial. wig vb. to wag.]

It's not in the LSJ at Perseus but there are other editions of LSJ no doubt. Just a thought.

I think Dr. Gibbs has solved the mystery. My copy of Liddell and Scott (New York, 1872) defines γυρῖνος as "tadpole, porwigle." Porwizzle is probably a misprint in Lewis' diary.

A few weeks ago I printed Palladas' epigram on the Descent of Man. Now I see that Thomas More translated it into Latin, with the title In hominis nativitatem (e Graeco), as number 59 of his epigrams:

Heus homo si memor es, quid te dum gigneret, egit
  tum pater, ex animo iam tumor ille cadet.
At Plato te fastu dum somniat inflat inani,
  aeternumque vocat semen et aethereum.
Factus es ecce luto, quid suspicis alta? sed istud
  plasmate qui te ornat nobiliore feret.
Quin si vera voles audire, libidine foeda
  natus es e coitu, guttula et e misera.

Three unfortunate ancient gentlemen (Theodorus, Diodorus, and Mentorides) owe their fifteen minutes of fame to their bad breath. The following epigrams come from the Greek Anthology (tr. W.R. Paton).

11.241 (Nicarchus):

Your mouth and your breech, Theodorus, smell the same, so that it would be a famous task for men of science to distinguish them. You ought really to write on a label which is your mouth and which your breech, but now when you speak I think you break wind.

Τὸ στόμα χὠ πρωκτὸς, Θεόδωρε, σοῦ ὄζει,
  ὥστε διαγνῶναι τοῖς φυσικοῖς καλὸν ἦν.
ἦ γράψαι σε ἔδει ποῖον στόμα, ποῖον ὁ πρωκτός,
  νῦν δὲ λαλοῦντος σου βδεῖν σ᾽ ἐνόμιζον ἐγώ.

11.242 (Nicarchus):

I can't tell whether Diodorus is yawning or has broken wind, for he has one breath above and below.

Οὐ δύναμαι γνῶναι, πότερον χαίνει Διόδωρος,
  ἢ βδῆσ᾽· ἓν γὰρ ἔχει πνεῦμα κάτω καὶ ἄνω.

11.415 (Antipater or Nicarchus):

Who, Mentorides, so obviously transferred your breech to the place where your mouth formerly was? For you break wind and do not breathe, and you speak from the lower storey. I wonder how your lower parts became your upper!

Τίς σοῦ, Μεντορίδη, προφανῶς οὕτως μετέθηκεν
  τὴν πυγήν, οὗπερ τὸ στόμ᾽ ἔκειτο πρὸ τοῦ;
βδεῖς γάρ, κούκ ἀναπνεῖς, φθέγγῃ δ᾽ ἐκ τῶν καταγείων.
  θαῦμά μ᾽ ἔχει τὰ κάτω πῶς σου ἄνω γέγονεν.

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Mark Ynys-Mon offers a new version of 11.241:

Matthew's mouth smells like an arse,
To scientist's great confusion.
Without a label none can parse
The source of his effusions.
When he speaks of love, or art -
All his listeners think he farts.

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Max Nelson adds:

Just another anecdote about halitosis in antiquity: Decamnichus claimed that Euripides had bad breath (Ar., Pol. 1311b33-34). For more Greek references to bad breath see Barry Baldwin, The Philogelos or Laughter-Lover (Amsterdam: 1983), p. 106.

Here is the Aristotle passage (tr. William Ellis):

Decamnichus also was the chief cause of the conspiracy against Archelaus, for he urged others on: the occasion of his resentment was his having delivered him to Euripides the poet to be scourged; for Euripides was greatly offended with him for having said something of the foulness of his breath.

William Cowper, The Poetical Works, ed. William Benham (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 503, in a section of Translations from the Greek:

Art thou some individual of a kind
Long-lived by nature as the rook or hind?
Heap treasure, then; for if thy need be such,
Thou hast excuse, and scarce canst heap too much.
But man thou seem'st: clear therefore from thy breast
This lust of treasure -- folly at the best!
For why shouldst thou go wasted to the tomb,
To fatten with thy spoils thou know'st not whom?

Benham in his notes does not identify the Greek original. It's by Lucilius, from the Greek Anthology 11.389:

Εἰ μὲν ζῇς ἐλάφου ταναὸν χρόνον, ἠὲ κορώνης,
  συγγνώμη πλεῖστον πλοῦτον ἀγειρομένῳ·
εἰ δέ τις ἐσσὶ βροτῶν, οὒς αὐτίκα γῆρας ἰάπτει,
  μή σέ γ᾽ ἀπειρεσίων οἶστρος ἕλῃ κτεάνων·
μὴ σὺ μὲν ἀτλήτοισιν ἐν ἄλγεσι θυμὸν ὀλέσσῃς,
  χρήσωνται δ᾽ ἄλλοι σοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἀπόνως.

Here is W.R. Paton's prose translation:

If thou livest the long years of a stag or crow thou mayest be pardoned for amassing great wealth, but if thou art one of mortal men, whom old age right soon assails, let not the furious desire of immeasurable possessions beset thee, lest thou destroy thy soul in insufferable torture and others use thy goods without toiling for them.

For more on this theme, see here.

It is inevitable that errors will creep into a book of 822 pages with double columns, but Robert Hendrickson's Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd edition (New York: Facts on File, 2004), seems to have more than its fair share of mistakes. Maybe the following blemishes will disappear in a third edition.

abracadabra (p. 3):

It was first mentioned in a poem by Quintus Severus Sammonicus in the third century.

The poet's name was Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, not Quintus Severus Sammonicus.

accolade (p. 5):

In medieval times men were knighted in a ceremony called the accolata (from the Latin ac, "at," and collum, "neck"), named for the hug around the neck received during the ritual, which also included a kiss and a tap of a sword on the shoulder. From accolata comes the English word accolade for an award or honor.

There is a Latin word ac, but it means "and," not "at." The Latin word for "at" or "to" is ad, which becomes ac- when prefixed to words beginning with c-.

by George (p. 121):

The name George has its origins in the Greek Georgos, "a farmer," literally a worker of the earth. The word comes from the Greek ge, "the earth," and legon, "a work," which also gives us Virgil's Georgics, an "agricultural poem" about the land and the men working it.

The Greek for "a work" is ergon, not legon.

derelict (p. 204):

Deriving from the Latin derelictus, "to forsake wholly, abandon," derelict at first meant any piece of property abandoned by its owner, being first recorded in 1649.

The infinitive derelinquere means "to forsake wholly, abandon." Its perfect passive participle, derelictus, means "having been forsaken, abandoned."

female (p. 257):

Male for a man comes from another Latin word, mas, which became masaulus and then masclus in Latin and finally male in French, from which it came into English as male.

Read masculus for masaulus.

fiddle while Rome burns (p. 259):

However, it could be that Nero climbed the tower of Maecenus on the third day of the fire and recited Priam's lament over the burning of Troy to musical accompaniment, as other accounts say.

Read Maecenas for Maecenus.

hang by a thin thread (p. 331):

The flatterer Damocles annoyed Dionysus the Elder of Syracuse with his constant references to the ruler's great power and consequent happiness.

Read Dionysius for Dionysus.

heliotrope (p. 341):

Many plant leaves and flowers turn toward the sun. The ancient Greeks noticed that this fragrant vanilla-scented perennial flower (Heliotropum arborsecems), often called "cherry pie," did so and called it the heliotrope, from the Greek heleo, "sun," and trepo, "turning to go into it."

Read arborescens for arborescems, helios for heleo, and turn for turning.

hoi polloi (p. 352):

Hoi polloi means the masses, the crowd, deriving from the Greek hoi pol'oi "the many."

The Greek is hoi polloi, not hoi pol'oi.

hydrangea (p. 366):

The Greeks of old thought this plant's seed capsule looked like a "water cup" and named it from the Greek hydr, "water," and angos, "seed" or "capsule."

The Greek word for "water" is hydor, which becomes hydr- or hydro- in composition.The Greek word for "seed" is sperma, not angos, which means "vessel" or "pitcher."

man is a wolf to man (p. 465):

But the expression is much older, dating, back at least to the Roman playwright Plautus in his Asimaria.

Remove the comma after dating and read Asinaria for Asimaria.

manniporchia (p. 465):

Curiously, only in northern Maryland does this word, deriving from the Greek mania a potu, (craziness from drink) mean the D.T.'s (delirium tremens).

Mania is Greek, but the words a potu are Latin, not Greek.

obese (p. 524):

Obese means very fat indeed, but the word comes from the Latin obesus, which is, ironically, the past participle of obdere, "to gnaw, to eat away, to thin."

Read obedere for obdere.

venial sin (p. 753):

Its opposite, a mortal sin, is a sin that deserves everlasting punishment, a deadly sin, from the Latin mort, "death."

There is no Latin word mort. Read mors, whose oblique cases all start with mort-.

Call this petty, pedantic carping if you will, but "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much" (Luke 16:10). Besides, we expect accuracy in a dictionary.

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Other posts from this blog on Hendrickson's errors:

• Barbarians and Beards
• Boning Up
  
• Cocqcigrues
  
• Giddy
• A Mangled Quotation
• The Word Expedite