"Unless you sleep with me, the terrorists will have won."

This "useful phrase" in the Latin language is one of many collected in humourist Henry Beard's cheeky 2005 phrasebook X-Treme Latin: All the Latin You Need to Know for Survival in the 21st Century. I had been considering reviewing this very text, when - lo and behold! - I found this nodeshell awaiting me. Who am I, to look a gift title in the mouth?

What is there to say about Beard's work, though, really? Speaking in my capacity as a Latin instructor, it's usually very good Latin, making use of clever grammatical conventions to achieve an easily recognisable reference to modern phenomena. The occasionally-abysmal translation here or there (and the frequent deliberate false translations) lend more to the charm than they detract from it. Speaking as someone who delights in comedy titles like Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists, it's also a properly funny book, but the humour relies heavily upon the convention of the book containing it. You generally can't just whip out one of these Latin one-liners in mixed company, and expect anyone else to get it; you have to save it up for a room full of other Latinists, all of whom will certainly have also read this book, since it's known in the field as a good bit of fun, and that won't make you look very clever at all. No, these jokes are purely for the enjoyment of the reader, and perhaps for the reader's adult Latin students, who have not yet been introduced to its charms. It's decidedly not suitable for children; pick-up lines abound and tend in the explicit direction. It's also flooded with golf jokes, and the younger crowd generally don't go in for that sort of thing.

Definitely don't expect to laugh very hard at this one if you aren't at least half a Latinist yourself; the greater abundance of humour here is found in how Beard assembles his one-liners in Latin, especially because sometimes the English translations are outright lies about what the Latin lines say, resulting in an oblivious monolingual reader being at risk of saying something drastically more offensive (and funnier in context) than what the English gloss indicates. Most of the lines in English read like something out of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, or something Deadpool or Niles Crane or Edmund Blackadder would say, a range between over-the-top snark and bone-dry erudition. In this regard, the tone really is very much how I would expect an ancient Roman to render their comedy to a modern audience; Catullus and Ovid recognisably have a similar manner of oscillating between understated irony and outrageous mock-theatrics.

Some of my favourite lines I shall provide now, as a sample to entice the interested reader. I can fairly say I recommend the book, and only caution a monolingual reader to not, for the love of God, ever actually use any of the book's lines around a Latinist (or, for that matter, a modern Italian, since these languages are quite similar), if you don't want to have said something quite salacious!

  • Download the goddamn file, you bug-ridden piece of shit! - Assume plicam damnatam, o tu moles muscaria muscerdarum!
  • Praescriptis severis de aedificiorum usu decretis a decurionibus municipalibus, mihi non licet operari domi. - Strict zoning codes enacted by the town board make it illegal for me to work at home.
  • Me dedo! Quaeso, noli iacere tela ballista! - I surrender! Please do not fire your catapult!
  • Vescimini glandibus plumbi candentis, velites nationalisticosocialistici cadaverosi automatarii! - Eat hot lead, Nazi zombie robot commandos!

As you can see, the subject matter of this phrasebook is diverse enough to accommodate many modern scenarios one may face. How good of the author, and how forward-thinking all the way back in 2005, to give me a way to refuse to work from home!

Eat your heart out, Mārce Tullī.


Iron Noder 2024, 10/30

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