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Linguistic latrine
This page is perpetually updated, just like my life and my stories.
Speaking of latrines, I cannot help but recollect here and now the most linguistically brilliant one I know. It’s right here in "Malo Danto", which in translation from my-speak means "Bad Tooth"—the phonetically disguised name of my dear town and its beloved first rate university. To satisfy the curiosity of those of you in the know we'll just call it the And here comes the first brilliant linguistic achievement on the wall of this most intellectual latrine: “Semper ubi sububi!” which of course means “Always wear underwear!” This is not your typical sophomoric oxymoron; it takes advanced learning to come up with such a pearl. Right underneath it thrones a fitting social humiliation rebuff produced by another brilliant scholar: “Graphito ergo scum”, meaning “If you do graffiti you are scum” in obvious competition with “Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum.” Why did Descartes ever do anything for posterity? What did posterity ever do for him?
But before I go any further, I have to make an aside close to a confession. I use the word “to explicitate” as an abbreviation of “to state explicitly”. This reminds me of the time when Nabokov saw in the writings of one of his students the sentence “The butterfly exits the flower”. Being the great lover of butterflies that he was, the most famous lepidopterist in the world and a man of “Strong opinions”, Nabokov didn’t hesitate to draw a circle around the word “exits” and to write a short comment right next to it, on his student’s paper. He wrote “Idiot!” Needles to say that in the current climate of political correctness Nabokov would have most certainly run into a lot of trouble at my beloved University of Malo Danto, where this episode actually took place many years ago.
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