Ovid I

As I am "reclaiming" my Latin, I pore through old high school text books and readers, delighted that the editors have provided not only interesting texts to read but that they have also supplied explanatory notes to make the reading more fun. In the press of life's activities, you really have to "work at" reclaming or even claiming your Latin. Difficult as that may be, it repays every moment spent with it. The purpose of this essay is to walk through some words in Ovid's engaging account of Daedalus and Icarus, asking how and if some of the Latin words made it into English.

1. Ovid begins by talking about how Daedalus utterly hated his exile in Crete. The Latin word is perosus. Behind it is the preposition per, suggesting throughness or completeness and odio-hatred. Thus, he thoroughly detested his situation. Though there are many English words derived from Latin using the "per" prefix, pernicious is one that also should give us pause. It comes from per and then nex, necis, which means "death" or "murder." So, something pernicious is a complete and thorough ruin or destruction. The first appearance of pernicious in English (15th century) was in a medical context: "Of a disease: extremely severe or harmful, life-threatening, fatal."

2. When Daedalus began to make the wings for himself and Icarus, his son, he put the feathers in order, beginning with the smallest, and then put long and short together, "ut clivo crevisse putes," or "so that one might suppose they rose from a hill." At first I wondered how you got "rose" from the infinitive crevisse, since it looks like crevice may underlie it, but in fact crepo, crepare, crepui, crepitus ("to burst, break, crack") lies behind crevice. But crevisse is an infinitive from cresco, crescere, crevi --to grow, such as in the word "crescent (i.e., "growing") moon" or the word crescendo, a growing sound. But then we have clivo--from a hill. Is there an English word that lies behind it? Sure enough, there is: clivose/clivous or, more popularly, the clivity in acclivity or declivity. Now we see the hill coming at us.

3. Ovid's language is so picturesque and entertaining. He then coes on to talk about how wings looking sort of like rough (rustica) pipe, with disparate-length feathers, arose. The pipe-device is called a fistula in Latin. Anyone familiar with medicine knows that a fistula is a "long, narrow, suppurrating canal of morbid origin in some part of the body; a long, sinuous pipe-like ulcer with a narrow orifice." Thus, instead of it being a sort of "fist," which its name might suggest, it is a tube.

4. While Daedalus, the skillful architect (and the English word daedal means "skillful" or "cunning to invent"), was making these wings, the symbols of their freedom, the son Icarus was standing by (stabat una) watching what was going on. He didn't know (ignarus) the danger he was handling (se tractare). Then, we have an even-more engaging picture of the boy. With "beaming mouth" (ore renidenti), he did various things. I thought it was significant that the word translated "beaming" (renidens) has no English words derived from it, though the word without the prefix, nidens, comes from niteo, which means to "glisten" or "shine" and has English words taken from it. For example nitent, which chiefly has a botanical meaning today, means "shining, lustrous, glossy" and nitid means "bright, shining, glossy." From 1657: "The best [scammony] is nitid, splendic, clear like gum...easily liquescible." The Latin verb splendescere, to become bright, stands behind splendic.

But here we have an interesting mini-confusion, which our language is so familiar with. Renidens means "beaming," but the Latin word from which it is derived is niteo, to beam. But renitens in Latin means "to offer resistence," derived from "re" (again) and niti (to struggle); the English is renitent or renitency. This latter verb, nitor, niti, nisus has an array of meanings, and it appears also in the passage on Daedalus. The basic meaning of nitor is rest, lean, support oneself. It can also mean "to strive, exert oneself, make an effort." I don't understand, in the first instance, how both of these meanings can be "right," since the meaning of the term then seems to suggest its opposite--both the leaning on something for rest and the exerting oneself, which seems to be the opposite of rest. Nevertheless, Ovid finds a use for it when describing the array of people leaning on things scanning the skies as Daedalus and Icarus fly above them. The line goes "aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator vidit et obstipuit..." and can be rendered, "either a shepherd with his staff or a plowman leaning upon (innixus--from innitor, lean upon) his plow-handle.

The word nisus in English has a meaning in philosophical discourse as an inclination, effort, impulse or tendency. From David Hume in 1752: "No animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment of a nisus or endeavor." But it could also be used in common parlance, as this 1796 diary entry shows: "I...have considerable reliance on that nisus towards a healthy state."

You could almost go line-by-line in Ovid, stopping to "smell" the richness of the words and the ways that many of the words make it into English. No time for that, even though this essay showed you a bit of the feast that would await the person who would completely "parse" Ovid.

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