In 1991 a feminist sculptor carved the following inscription on a marble tombstone: VERITAS TEMPORAS FILIA—a noble idea: "Truth is the daughter of time." But when it was pointed out that the genitive of TEMPUS should be TEMPORIS, she retorted angrily that she "refused to be confined by male grammar."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Male Grammar
Niall Rudd, "Classical Humanism and Its Critics," Echos du Monde Classique 15 (1996) 283-303 (at 292):