In the last chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a priest makes a pun:

“Onerem accipisne?” [Do you accept the burden?]
“Honorem accipio.” [I accept the honor.]

In classical Latin, onus ‘burden’ is neuter, so the accusative is onus not onerem. Even a dead language, it seems, changes at least a little bit during the future dark ages.

April 20: Oops, I misremembered. The first priest’s line is tibine imponemus oneri? [Shall we impose the burden on thee?] — where ‘burden’ is instrumental, not accusative.

Google finds 36 thousand uses of the phrase searing indictment.

Ever wonder about the use of the word liquidation as euphemism for political murder? It’s not in Webster’s New International, 2d ed. of 1952.

Mail through yahoo.com.ar yesterday carried the tag Ahora podés usar Yahoo! Messenger en tu Unifón . . . . Shouldn’t podés be puedes?

隠し砦の三悪人 (Hidden Fortress) (1958, dir. Kurosawa). Good fun. — I don’t understand Japanese, but noticed that the princess seemed to use her title hime as pronoun.

Rio Bravo (1959, dir. Hawks). Drags some. — When I saw this years ago on AMC(?), the presenter told the story that, when Howard Hawks started to pitch the plot, John Wayne quickly recognized it as one they had made before (which I think I had also seen, though its title now escapes me) and asked, “Do I get to be the drunk this time?”

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1958, dir. Truffaut). My One True Ex warned me that it’s quite boring. I watched some of the beginning, and a bit near the end, and concluded that she was likely right. — The translation of the title is unfortunate: coups here is better rendered as strokes, and anyway the phrase really means, roughly, every trick in the book. — Most movies on DVD have twenty or thirty scene-markers; this has only six.

Ohayô (Good Morning) (1959, dir. Ozu). Amusing slice of suburban life. — Someone says “sayonara” and I think, is this the first time I’ve ever heard a Japanese use that word?

Orfeu Negro (1959, dir. M.Camus). Pretty but unsatisfying: the drivers of the plot – Eurydice’s nemesis, and Orfeu’s love for her – are never motivated. — I was surprised to understand so few words of a Romance language; and more surprised at the frequency of the pronoun você. Is tu as dead in Brazil as thou in the Anglosphere?

The Immaculate Collection, Madonna videos of the Eighties. It turned out to include only two that I hadn’t seen a hundred times (“Borderline” and “La Isla Bonita”), plus a staging of “Vogue” that’s even sillier than the familiar one. I was hoping it would have “Justify My Love” which was deemed too racy for MTV. No luck. — When she wore that sheer top in “Vogue”, where did her nips go?

An Ideal Husband (1999, dir. O.Parker). Not all of Oscar Wilde’s plays, I find, are as fluffy as Earnest. Excellent performances, too.

I forgot to mention last week that my One True Ex dragged me to see Stage Beauty (2003, dir. R.Eyre), a comedy about gender issues during the Stuart Restoration. It’s a treat.

It amuses me to have a go at translating this Livejournal entry by François-René Rideau (“Faré”):

. . . in taking positions based on static emotions disconnected from causal mechanisms, [the socialists] come to advocate absurdities. The more Swiss cheese, the more holes; the more holes, the less cheese; therefore, the more cheese, the less cheese. Correlations with moving referent, variation of the constant, semantic slippage — an anti-conceptual mentality, impaired from proper reasoning, exposes itself to such sophisms.
. . .
Enemy of the people and of the other enemies of the people, alone in the world where man is man’s wolf, where each is the enemy of all — behold at once the spectre that socialism demonizes and the prophecy that socialism realizes.

To which I suppose a socialist would say, I know you are but what am I?

Some of Faré’s entries are in (excellent) English, by the way.

About a decade ago, someone or other wrote in The Nation advocating that the Left reclaim the word populist. I was tempted to send a letter asking whether, in that case, we individualists could have liberal back.

The Economist, in its current issue, makes a similar plea for liberal, remarking:

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well – even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government – in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms.