Classics people drive me fucking nuts.

Classics people drive me fucking nuts, I think for two reasons: for one, they study bullshit with no relevance to today; and for another, they seem to decently like the field but not love it, so combined with its meaningless and their half-hearted love of the field you get this beadling little defensiveness, especially about the languages -- if you try to challenge them on anything having to do with grammar or semantics, even when they have a weak argument based on a close reading of the text, they close up fort and start deferring to authority and the big grammars and dictionaries assembled by Germans ages ago, like those mean anything apart from the meaning of a word in context.

(I wonder if this instinctive appeal to authority is reflected too in their initial choice of field, since most people go into classics because of a half-articulated desire to recover the Greek-and-Latin jerk-off education everyone who was white and worth anything was educated in years and years ago?)

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Okay, so case in point --

Today when in class when we were going round-robin around the class and translating Pliny's letter to Trajan about the Christians, I got the following sentence about interrogating Christians:

Alii... esse se Christianos dixerunt et mox negaverunt; fuisse quidem sed desisse, quidam ante triennium, quidam ante plures annos, non nemo etiam ante viginti.

Others said that they were Christians and a little later made a denial; they were (Christians), to be sure, but they had stopped, some three years ago, some many years ago, [word in question, lit., "not no-one"] even twenty years ago.

I translated the "not no one", which pretty much means "some", as "even one", and I got called out on it, and they said that the phrase was equivalent to the "quidam" ('some'), which Pliny had just used twice, only he changed vocab for variety, and anyhow the dictionary says it means "some" and doesn't say it can mean a singluar person.

I, however, drew this table --

quidam ante triennium
quidam ante plures annos
non nemo etiam ante viginti

-- and made three points:

1) Pliny in the second column is increasing the distance back that people had left the sect, emphasizing the "even twenty years ago" with the addition of the word "etiam" ("even"), and so it makes sense to think that "non nemo" refers to a smaller indefinite portion than the preceeding "quidam"s -- i.e., Pliny is increasing the tension in the lefthand column in conjunction with the right.

2) Since "Non nemo" means "not no one", it only makes sense to think that the word could apply to one person, since one person would negate the "no one" and you'd then have someone (i.e., at least one person) there.

3) It would be extremely odd that "non nemo" could only indicate a plurality; "nemo" is in the singular, and historically it got generalized to take on a plural indefinite meaning, which isn't odd, though it would be odd if it got generalized and any vestigial singular meaning excluded.

4) It would be odd that there would be no semantic difference between "quidam" and "non nemo", for if Pliny was mixing up words, why did he repeat "quidam" two times and not mix it up with a different word then?

I then conceded that nothing in the context would let you distinguish between "non nemo" meaning "one" or meaning "some people, though less people than indicated by 'quidam'", and that this range of meanings I'm proposing should be solved by resorting to lexical parallels, but all indications in this passage indicate that they're the ones who are wrong and should do the legwork on this.

I also made the further point that their argument for "non nemo" is a 'least common denominator' semantic argument and sacrifices probable nuance; you can offer that for translation whenver it appears and it will probably work, but it won't capture the wider range of meaning that seems likely in some contexts.

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Anyhow, the TA said I made no sense and said I should talk with the Latin prof who I happened to have last spring and who disagreed with a very well-founded argument I put forward in a term paper in his class, and so I'm ticked. I need to stay away from Classics people. For the most part, they're a type, and I need to head off these arguments by not disagreeing with them publicly in the first place.

Indeed, I remember the same thing happened to a prof of mine in a paper she presented last year, and I was the only person in the room who saw her interpretation of the Greek dative as not only plausible, but even likely, and even gave her another minor argument for her reading, against the rigidity of the classics profs in the room who totally jumped her ass without listening to what she was saying, which was valid and is a type of approach that should be considered more often.