{"id":245,"date":"2008-11-02T23:32:52","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T03:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=245"},"modified":"2008-11-03T00:37:25","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T04:37:25","slug":"245","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=245","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Laudator Temporis Acti<\/em> has an <a href=\"http:\/\/laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com\/2008\/10\/comical-construes.html\">amusing post<\/a> on &#8216;comical construes&#8217;. Here is another, as I heard it from one of my professors in grad school:<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Satires<\/em> 1.4.120, Horace uses the phrase <em>nabis sine cortice<\/em>, &#8220;you will swim without a cork&#8221;, to express the independence of adulthood. Some years ago, a Harvard undergraduate translating the passage could not find <em>nabis<\/em> in his own little dictionary, so with admirable diligence he went to the library to check the unabridged lexica. In one or more of them he found <em>nabus<\/em>, a <em>hapax legomenon<\/em> of alleged Ethiopian origin found in the Elder Pliny (<em>Nat.<\/em> 8.69, according to the <em>OLD<\/em>). Assuming that <em>nabis<\/em> was an alternate form of this word, he combined it with the more general meaning of <em>cortex<\/em> and translated <em>nabis sine cortice<\/em> &#8220;a giraffe without a skin&#8221;. At that point, the eminent scholar teaching the class threw his book across the room and swore he would never teach undergraduates again. Of course, verb forms like <em>nabis<\/em>, where the stem is only a single letter, are hard to construe if you haven&#8217;t learned your endings.<\/p>\n<p>If I ever knew the professor&#8217;s name, I have forgotten it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laudator Temporis Acti has an amusing post on &#8216;comical construes&#8217;. Here is another, as I heard it from one of my professors in grad school: In Satires 1.4.120, Horace uses the phrase nabis sine cortice, &#8220;you will swim without a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=245\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}