{"id":343,"date":"2009-07-01T21:38:02","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T01:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=343"},"modified":"2009-07-01T21:38:02","modified_gmt":"2009-07-02T01:38:02","slug":"latin-puzzle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Latin Puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it was Patterico’s Pontifications<\/a> where I recently ran across a weblog called Verum Serum<\/a>. An interesting name, since it has three or four meanings in Latin:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. True Whey<\/strong> (taking Verum<\/em> as an adjective and Serum<\/em> as a noun). I thought the second word meant ‘gravy’, but apparently not, at least in classical Latin. Which is too bad: “True Gravy” might almost work as a website name, but not “True Whey”.<\/li>\n
  2. Late Truth<\/strong> (taking Verum<\/em> as a noun and Serum<\/em> as an adjective). Alternatively, this could mean “Too Late Truth” or “The Truth Too Late”, since the adjective has both meanings.<\/li>\n
  3. Truth of the Chinese<\/strong> (taking both words as nouns, with Serum<\/em> genitive plural). Just to be pedantic, “Chinese” here is plural, so perhaps “Truth of the Chinese people”. (Hmmm. That’s not clearly plural, either, since “people” may be a singular meaning “nation” or a plural meaning “persons, humans”. English is a tricky language.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So which of these interesting possibilities is the right one? None, as it turns out: it’s only half Latin. As the proprietors say on their ‘About’ page, “Verum<\/em> is Latin for truth, as in truth serum<\/em>. Why Latin? Because we\u2019re tired of the Catholic blogs hogging all the cool names.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I think it was Patterico’s Pontifications where I recently ran across a weblog called Verum Serum. An interesting name, since it has three or four meanings in Latin: True Whey (taking Verum as an adjective and Serum as a noun). … Continue reading →<\/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":[25,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-orbilius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}