conversation

[glaucon]

me: "so I'm interested in taking some greek and latin classes over the next few quarters, but I'm not sure how well my skills have held up after not using them much over the last ten years."

guy at the classics department: "yeah, I don't know either."

me: "is there some sort of placement test you give to people who want to take language courses? something that would help determine what level would be appropriate for me to start out at?"

guy at the classics department: "no, not really. we usually just sort of base our evaluation of that sort of thing on how much previous study you've done elsewhere and sort of a conversational assessment of how much you seem to know."

me: "my previous study was a long time ago. I've forgotten an awful lot."

guy at the classics department: "well, how far did you go with your studies back when you were doing them?"

me: "I took 3 or 4 upper (like, 300 and 400) level latin courses, and I did 2 reading courses in greek - one plato and one homer."

guy at the classics department: "uh huh."

me: "and I feel reasonably ok about the latin. I've forgotten a lot of it, but I think if I start using it again, it'll come back pretty quickly."

guy at the classics department: "uh huh."

me: "but I think I've lost almost all of my greek. I was never really great at it even at my best, and the stuff I did know has pretty much entirely left my head."

guy at the classics department: "oh, I'm sure it hasn't left your head completely. it's probably just in the attic."

me: [speechless]

Comments

[mstegosaurus.livejournal.com]

At⋅tic
   
–adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Greece or of Athens.

*rimshot*

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

right. but in particular, attic is a specific dialect.

and using "the" in front of a proper noun is a pretty typical ancient greek construction: e.g. "ho Homeros" (literally "the Homer") to refer to simply "Homer".

what's more, attic is often the dialect that one learns as a beginning student in ancient greek. plato, sophocles, most of those other athenian guys, all wrote in attic greek. in more advanced courses, one starts to get into lyric poetry which is often written in doric greek, and into the iliad and odyssey, which, when they were finally written down, use an ancestor of attic called homeric or ionian.

anyway, saying "you haven't forgotten - it's just in the attic" is really awful because it's not only a simply "honk-honk" kind of pun, but it actually has a full body of secondary meaning apart from the one about "information is available but hard to access". that secondary meaning being "you probably haven't forgotten it, but chances are that the stuff you know is more the beginner kinda stuff - stuff written 'in the Attic'".

it's almost as good as another brutal pun I ran across on the classics mailing list a few years ago. it was during a time when several scandals had recently hit the news regarding child-molesting priests. on the particular day in question, Cardinal Law in Boston had announced that he was not going to respond to the allegations in any way - saying essentially that it was not his job.

some guy on the classics list linked to the story and said "de minimus non curat Lex".

...which is a common legal phrase meaning "the law does not concern itself with trifles" (a vague approximation of what the Cardinal's comment actually said) but with the "L" capitalized, could also can be translated as "Law does not care about minors".

the fact that it also works in the word "curat" which is the root of the word "curate" which is a synonym for priest is just the fucking icing on the cake.

[twistedncynical.livejournal.com]

Oh, right. You guys are far too clever for me.