Item the first: how do you clean a toilet? If you're not doing it this way, you're probably doing it wrong.
Item the second: My sister-in-law had an oblique request a translation of the family motto (we are not the assholes) into Latin. Up to the challenge, I popped downstairs and grabbed one of my copy of Latin for All Occasions (Yes, I have a copy. And I admit it. ) After a little page flipping, I came up with non podices nos.[*]
Just as a sanity check, I googled for the singular (podex) to see if I was completely off base. Turns out I'm not. At least one article somewhere mentions the term podex maximus.
The NYC Office of Emergency Management, on the other hand, is a little off base. They named last month's bioterrorist preparedness exercise PODEX, or Point-of-Dispensing Exercise. Yep. Dozens of city, state, federal and non-profit agencies all got together to participate in operation asshole.
*: As corrected. See below.
Update: Thanks to pijll, bart and Damian for correcting my Latin grammar and spelling. Who knew that one particularly poor choice of words could lead to three egregious errors? ;-)
However, it's fifteen years since my last Latin classes, so I might be wrong.
Re:Latin
ziggy on 2005-07-19T20:51:46
It's been, um, 20 years since I took that one term of Latin, so you're probably right.Thanks!
Re:sumus
Damian on 2005-07-19T20:39:49
Definitey "sumus"."Summus" means "greatest", which would give you (very roughly) "assholes don't rule, okay".
And I do agree that something like "non podices nos" is a much more idiomatic translation. The Romans tended to avoid writing "is" explicitly (probably because it's so hard to conjugate
;-). Re:sumus
ziggy on 2005-07-19T21:00:34
No it isn't! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)The Romans tended to avoid writing "is" explicitly (probably because it's so hard to conjugate;-). Thanks for the correction and clarification.
Re:sumus
ziggy on 2005-07-19T20:57:14
summus is probably coming from too many years of studying French^W misspelled, mispronounced Latin as butchered by those infernal, barbaric Gauls.(i.e. nous sommes)
