for wunderkammer: ancient greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt engraved on one side and the inscription “take that” (δεξαι) on the other.
other sling slogans include “ouch” and “for pompey’s backside!”
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photo source: wikipedia. more ancient greek fun with slogan embossery can be found here.
tascodrugian • a nose-picker
according to epiphanius:
They are called Tascodrugians for the followin reason. Their word for “peg” is “tascus,” and “drungus” is their word for “nostril” or “snout.” And since they put their licking finger, as we call it, on their nostril when they pray…some people have given them the name of Tascodrugians, or “nose-pickers.”
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source: the panarion of epiphanius of salamis, vol. 2 by frank williams
according to basenotes.net, the online social network for people who love smells, here are some possible candidates for cleopatra in odor form:
i am not making this stuff up, people. this is real.
![select non-verbal subtitles from the movie troy*
[WARRIORS CHEERING][WARRIORS CHUCKLING][GASPS][GRUNTING][BANGING][MUSIC PLAYING][WOMEN LAUGHING][WARRIORS MUMBLING][CROWD SINGING AND LAUGHING][HORSE NEIGHS][ODYSSEUS CHUCKLING][BRISEIS WHIMPERING][HELEN SOBBING][CROWS CAWING][PARIS GROANING][KNIFE CLANGING][HORN BLOWING][WARRIORS SCREAMING][CRYING][GASPING][SOBBING][MEN GROANING AND SCREAMING][WOMAN SCREAMING][GASPS][MEN SHOUTING]
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*in order of appearance](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhqwhq9RH51qzrip0o1_500.jpg)
select non-verbal subtitles from the movie troy*
[WARRIORS CHEERING]
[WARRIORS CHUCKLING]
[GASPS]
[GRUNTING]
[BANGING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMEN LAUGHING]
[WARRIORS MUMBLING]
[CROWD SINGING AND LAUGHING]
[HORSE NEIGHS]
[ODYSSEUS CHUCKLING]
[BRISEIS WHIMPERING]
[HELEN SOBBING]
[CROWS CAWING]
[PARIS GROANING]
[KNIFE CLANGING]
[HORN BLOWING]
[WARRIORS SCREAMING]
[CRYING]
[GASPING]
[SOBBING]
[MEN GROANING AND SCREAMING]
[WOMAN SCREAMING]
[GASPS]
[MEN SHOUTING]
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*in order of appearance
my eudora email client has been pulsing with electronic letters from a handful of friends, fake friends, and adultfriendfinder.com friends with hawt news about the rhetorical device known as the paraprosdokian. here’s what jimmy wales has to say about it »
A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.
blah blah blah, let’s get to some examples of paraporsdokia before we all fall asleep:
my conclusion: a paraprosdokian is a long word for a one-liner.
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like the word ecdysiast, paraprosdokian is likely a modern greek neologism for a historical greek stimulus.
![the roman god of hot wet doo-doo
i don’t like discussing religion on the ragbag because i don’t believe in words that end in -ion. but from time to time i do make an exception. today is one of those times because i just learned about sterculius, the roman god of hot wet doo-doo.
for a poo god to make sense, one must understand that the early romans were deeply agrarian and that feces was then (as it still is all these many years later) a dependable fertilizer. thus, to pray to sterculius was to pray for a bountiful harvest. in fact, there was an entire of pantheon of kooky field gods:
Collina [presided] over the hills, and Vallonia over the valleys. Epona had charge of horses, Bubona of oxen. Seia or Segetra looked to the seed and the springing corn. Runcina was invoked when the fields were to be weeded; Occator, when they were to be harrowed. Sator and Sarritor presided over sowing and raking. Robigus or Robigo was worshiped to avert mildew.
there you have it, the next time that you spot some gnarly mildew in your fraternity house shower stall, drop robigo a quick prayer and hopefully everything will get cleared up in time for your next round of hazing.
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picture: the god sterculius as depicted in an old beavis and butt-head episode.source: the mythology of ancient greece and italy (1854).](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfmw6kIW5T1qzrip0o1_500.jpg)
the roman god of hot wet doo-doo
i don’t like discussing religion on the ragbag because i don’t believe in words that end in -ion. but from time to time i do make an exception. today is one of those times because i just learned about sterculius, the roman god of hot wet doo-doo.
for a poo god to make sense, one must understand that the early romans were deeply agrarian and that feces was then (as it still is all these many years later) a dependable fertilizer. thus, to pray to sterculius was to pray for a bountiful harvest. in fact, there was an entire of pantheon of kooky field gods:
Collina [presided] over the hills, and Vallonia over the valleys. Epona had charge of horses, Bubona of oxen. Seia or Segetra looked to the seed and the springing corn. Runcina was invoked when the fields were to be weeded; Occator, when they were to be harrowed. Sator and Sarritor presided over sowing and raking. Robigus or Robigo was worshiped to avert mildew.
there you have it, the next time that you spot some gnarly mildew in your fraternity house shower stall, drop robigo a quick prayer and hopefully everything will get cleared up in time for your next round of hazing.
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picture: the god sterculius as depicted in an old beavis and butt-head episode.
source: the mythology of ancient greece and italy (1854).
ray’s phrase that pays in lays
the next time that you see a group of oppositely-gendered libertines gazing up at the heavens, approach the most alpha among them and whisper: neptune’s tiny dancing girls look pretty to-night. this odd observation is actually a mnemonic device for recalling neptune’s inner moons in order: naiad, thalassa, despina, galatea, larissa, proteus, triton, & nereid. if you are not able to immediately seduce attractive strangers with this phrase, you are doing it all wrong.
way the heck back in five hundred bee cee (or thereabouts) hanno the navigator, a carthaginian explorer set sail for the african coast to see what there was to be seen. mostly it was boring trees and ugly beaches. occasionally, he would come across some dismal marshes. but then things began to get juicy. here is his account from two point five thousand years before you were born:
Following the rivers of fire for three further days, we reached a gulf named Southern Horn. In the gulf lay an island like the previous one, with a lake, and in it another island. The second island was full of wild people. By far the greater number were women with hairy bodies…We gave chase to the men, but could not catch any, for they all scampered up steep rocks and pelted us with stones. We secured three women, who bit and scratched and resisted us.
it is now generally regarded that hanno’s “wild people” were actually chimpanzees.
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translation of hanno’s periplus: cary and warmington (1929).
source: “knowledge of the ape in antiquity,” by ashley montagu, isis (1940).
the echo verse is an ancient form of poetry based on wordplay. in it, a speaker in a quandary shouts out his questions to the nymph echo who then responds by repeating the last few syllables in a way that seems to answer his queries. while many dismiss the form as false wit (at best and nonsense at worst), several of history’s greatest writers have composed echo verses. to namedrop a few: ovid, euripides, erasmus, jonathan swift, and victor hugo. here is swift’s ribald attempt to woo a woman named ann via echo verse.
A Gentle Echo on Woman
Say what will turn that frisking coney
Into the toils of matrimony?
……Money
Has Phoebe not a heavenly brow?
Is it not white as pearl, as snow?
……Ass! no!
Her eyes! Was ever such a pair!
Are the stars brighter than they are?
……They are!
Echo, thou liest but can’t deceive me.
Her eyes eclipse the stars, believe me.
……Leave me
But come, thou saucy, pert romancer,
Who is as fair as Phoebe, answer!
……Ann, sir!
face merkins
everywhere i go, people are always telling me about their trendy new merkins, but nobody is paying much attention to the pubic wig’s northern cousin—the chin wig. yet, the fake beard is almost as old as beards themselves (with a history just as lush).
egyptian pharaohs (and even she-pharaohs) donned gold plated chin wigs (called atefs) despite the cultural penchant for hairlessness. the charming specimen above was recovered from the 4th century b.c. frozen grave of a central asian chieftain by indiana jones.
and then medieval europe caught onto the chin wig craze:
False beards crop up again in medieval Spain. By the mid-fourteenth century they were so much in fashion that a wealthy gentleman might have possessed a whole range of them in various colors, shapes and sizes to suit different moods and occasions. In fact the abuse became so widespread that the king of Aragon banned them. At Rouen, in France, false beards were made illegal in 1508, but the edict had to be repeated in 1513. The fact that there were two official efforts to ban them in such a short space of time suggests that they were immensely popular.
our 16th century rallying cry: they may take our lives, indeed they may even take our beards, but they will never take our face merkins.
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source: ancient inventions (1994) by james & thorpe
an additional account of anti-facial hair legislation can be found here.
words wholly unrelated
mouse & dormouse
both are freaky little rodents and both have the word mouse in their name, but neither word is related. mouse comes from the old english word mus while dormouse most likely comes from the latin word dormir meaining “to sleep” (the dormouse is inactive in the winter).
incidentally, as long as i still have this cookbook infronta me, here is schwabe’s recipe for ancient rome-style stuffed dormice:
prepare a stuffing of dormouse meat, pepper, pine nuts, broth, asafœtida, and some garum. stuff the mice and sew them up. bake them in the oven on a tile.
know your furors
quite by accident, i have encountered several latin furor phrases while reading books between laps at the natatorium. here are as many as i could find. if you know of any more, please consider twittering them at me.
who knew that there was this longstanding tradition of fury? maybe these writers, poets, academic types, epileptics, etcetry etcetry need to take a chill pill and listen to some jason mraz.
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bonus: how could we discus fury and not the æneid? let us not forget virgil’s furor arma ministrat (rage provides arms, ie. one uses any weapon when enraged).
an easter egg: this is a sekrit f-word post aggregated from various dictionaries, non-dictionaries, and conversations with a peete’s coffee barista.
previously: know your noms
eureka! & heuristics
both words come from the greek verb εὑρίσκ (to find). the former was exclaimed by archimedes when he discovered some boring principle that nobody cared about (literally, “i have found it.”) the latter is a method of problem solving and is used widely by computer programmers and identity thieves.
where my classicists at? i took five levels of latin in undergrad so that when i got into law school i would already know the difference between in posse and in esse or what the heck a doli incapax is. well friends, it turns out that latin is useful for more than just boning up on the legal system—it is also good for secretly making fun of people and selecting bitching mottoes for your tombstone*.
here are a few juicy latin phrases (that begin with f) from which you are free to pick and choose.
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*(and/or ex libris)
source: a new dictionary of quotations from the greek, latin, and modern languages (1859).
why egyptology ownz:
because one of the letters of the egyptian hieroglyphabet is gardiner d53 described as, “phallus with liquid issuing from it.” this glyph shows up in words like “come apart”, “flow”, “twitch”, “wriggle”, “impure fluid”, and “spray”. can you imagine if this was the 27th letter of the roman alphabet?!? oh the fun that we would have…
also: the sumerians had some equally righteous ideograms. (eg. jaritz #919)
