Leftover Vanity Plates Of The Month
Saw AD OTIUM. My Latin is rusty. Is this being at leisure or being at peace?
On a Cadillac saw EMBASSY. Was this really from an embassy, or is that what they want us to think?
LA FREAK. Let your freak flag fly!
HEAVON. A cute way to spell heaven, but it sure looks a lot like heave on.
WAN LUV. Why have wan love when you're so close to man love?
AARNAGE. A guy named Arnie who's very violent?
APR[heart symbol]14. I assume this person's love was born on April 14. Or maybe he approves of marrying 14 year olds.
DABUTLR. He did it.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:15 AM
3 Comments:
The writer means "at leisure".
But his choice of preposition is wrong. Casual Latin translators (like whoever does the Latin translations for TV shows like Buffy) translate from English to Latin word-for-word and they usually get poor results, and this driver probably did the same. "At leisure" should be "in otio", or even just the ablative "otio". The only time you would use "ad otium" would be in a sentence such as Caesar's "Valde me ad otium conversi" (literally "I forcibly turned myself toward leisure", i.e., "I forced myself to calm down").
"At leisure" is much more accurate than "at peace". You could choose the latter, but only if the context made it clear that you meant relaxation. "With a cup of tea in one hand and a good book in the other, Jerry was at peace in his easy chair despite the sound of gunfire in the distance." But not "peace" in the sense of peace between nations or peace between feuding families; that is almost always pax.
This all feels like a scene from Life Of Brian.
*grin*
Sadly, Life of Brian is now out of date, even in England. In the 1970s, it mocked the bad Latin that some English schoolchildren had.
But the Harry Potter books were an order of magnitude worse. Rowling's spells are supposedly Latin but they are so mangled and nonsensical that it's clear that she doesn't really care, and doesn't expect her readers to care. Her spells are to Latin as this Queen song is to Arabic.
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