Hazing.

The football fraternity on campus has an annual naked dodgeball match for pledges, only they get wet in a wading pool and roll around in flour first before the match.

TV - Gym reading - More on Classics people - Book.

If I had a tv, I think I'd watch "Gossip Girl".

At the gym I hit two new lows tonight -- I brought along Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to read for class, but I ended up reading USWeekly instead because a cover story "Inside Brit's Twisted Mind" caught my eye.

It's interesting that Early Christianity people, who read a lot of the same texts as Classicists (though the reverse isn't true), is an entirely different type of person... They tend to be searchers, many from fundamentalist backgrounds, or people who feel strongly about the Bible and how it's read. If you put Classicists and Early Christianity people in a room, I think you could easily tell them apart.

Going home now to read my brand-spanking new copy of "The Bible and Its Influence".

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.

Dream Dream Dream: Corn, Concert.

Like two weeks ago I dreamt that I shucked a cob of corn, and inside the cob had misshapen, irregularly-shaped kernels, some blackened and rotten, and the dried-up cob showed through in between the kernels that were there.

A few days after that, I dreamed I was at a small-venue rock concert and had just gotten a plastic cup of beer and was walking along the edge of the crowd, and I ran into someone I knew, who was standing there by themselves at the edge of the crowd, also with a plastic cup of beer. I don't remember who it was, though, though I think they were around my age.

Correspondence of Pliny and Trajan on the Christians.

The Pliny-Trajan correspondence from the early 2nd c. is the earliest outside attestation of the existence of Christians. Tacitus and Suetonius write shortly afterwards about earlier periods, but who knows how dependable the reports they replied upon were, whereas this is the report of a guy about contemporaries. Pliny writes to Trajan to find out norms for interrogating the new sect, and it's damn interesting.

Cold, dance lessons.

Yesterday when I used my neti pot I snotted out in the sink a big hunk of green snot the size of a couple quarters laid side by side.

I had my dance lessons again yesterday. The female dance instructor laughs a lot when she's sidling up to dance an example round with the male instructor. She seems like someone who it's easy to have private little jokes with.

Buffy and the Hebrew Bible.

Today in my Hebrew Bible class the prof was talking about Leviticus 17:11 and I couldn't help thinking about Season Five of Buffy.

Hungarian thanks.

This Hungarian I know on campus e-mailed me for advice on bike locks (he knows I bike a lot and we had talked before when he told me he was thinking of getting a bike), and after I wrote him back with my recommendations on bike locks, he wrote back, "Szenksz veri macs," which is transliterating "Thanks very much" into Hungarian, substituting a few sounds along the way.

This is funny if you can sound out Hungarian.

Karaoke ambivalence...

I'm trying to pump people up for karaoke this Friday, but the response so far isn't great. Mostly, when I ask people what they're doing on Friday and they're like "Nothing" or "I don't know," I've been responding, "No, the right answer is, 'karaoke'!", they've mostly been making faces, which hurts me inside.

Two stock sayings: white, balls.

When I read Freakonomics a few months ago, I was struck by how the statistically whitest name in the U.S. is "Dov" (a typically Jewish name, it's Hebrew for 'bear'; I think what happens is that Hebrew proper names from the Bible like "Isaiah" and "David" get mixed in enough with the black population that they don't appear on the list of hte whitest names, but Hebrew non-proper names are typically Jewish and thus rocket those names among the white population). So, now whenever I see a guy in my doctoral program by that name, I'm always like, "Dude, you are so white." I don't think he thinks it's funny, though when I told him about the Freakonomics name-list thing, he found it mildly interesting.

My new phrase as of a year ago, too, if it's hot out, is, "Man, I'm sweating my balls off in here."

Question.

Remember when the Spanish were bad-ass, and not just the comic relief of the European Union?

Idioms/The cha-cha/Bugs.

I saw my building's janitor yesterday and he was saying about his sister, who's landlord, that she doesn't have any hair on her tongue. (This was in relation to her telling young people when they move in to be quiet and not have any parties.) I think that idiom is Spanish, too, only my building's janitor and my landlord are not Spanish, but Croatian!

This upcoming week is my last dance classes for tango and samba. People are pissed that intermediate tango isn't going to be coming up for another few months, since everyone's really hyped for it, but instead they're having waltz and cha-cha. I was pissed too, since waltz and cha-cha really don't intereste me, until I remembered that in the original Hairspray movie they dance the cha-cha to "Duke of Earl", which is really sweet, and now makes me want to take the class. I wonder if I convince the instructors to bring in an MP3 of "Duke of Earl" so everyone can dance to it.

On Friday night when I came home I went to open up the blinds so I could open up the windows and air my apartment before bed, only when I opened up the first blind, a 2.5-inch silverfish fell out of the blindwork and onto the floor, and I was able to crush it, fortunately, though it was moving fast because I think it was startled. Last night when I woke up and went to take a piss, a small silverfish (1/2-inch long) was ambling along by the threshold to the bathroom, I noticed mid-piss, so I just gingerly stepped over and crushed it.

Two black women: inside the pharmacy, outside a salon.

On Friday night on my way home after dinner I stopped by the pharmacy to pick up some stuff, and the place was hopping. When I was coming back up front from the cold/flu section, this older guy with a gray goatee and earring who works for the local paper and his wife, who was also older and had short short hair and a leather jacket, were walking a few steps in front of me, and somehow the woman rather forcefully bumped this young black pharmacy worker who was going the opposite way, only she never turned around and apologized, even though the pharmacy worker just turned back to look at her and was like, "Excuse me?" Finally, after a few moments, when she got no response from the woman and she saw that the woman was just keeping on walking, she just said loudly, "Ignorant," and turned and went back on her way.

On Saturday afternoon when I was coming back home with my groceries and was walking in front of a black hair salon on the main business strip between the grocery store and my house, this grizzled, thin old black woman practically fled out the door and leaned back against the wall and lit up her cigarette like she really needed it, and after one deep inhale, she stared out into space and shook her head a little and said to no one in particular, "Free at last."