From aradin@exeter.edu Sun Mar 5 15:08:00 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id PAA52574 for ; Sun, 5 Mar 2000 15:07:59 -0800 Received: from [204.164.70.3] (exeter.edu [204.164.70.3]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with SMTP id PAA21445 for ; Sun, 5 Mar 2000 15:07:58 -0800 Received: from mail.exeter.edu by [204.164.70.3] via smtpd (for mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) with SMTP; 5 Mar 2000 23:07:58 UT Received: from exeter.edu [172.16.2.96] by mail.exeter.edu with ESMTP (SMTPD32-6.00) id A7CF7EC0070; Sun, 05 Mar 2000 18:03:43 -0500 Message-ID: <38C2E8CD.D4768492@exeter.edu> Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 18:07:57 -0500 From: Alice Radin X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (WinNT; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics list Subject: The Eternal Rabbit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The entire class involved has given me permission to post this to the list. It was a colleague's Vergil class that I was teaching while he was at the CANE meeting, and because the students had finished the term's work with a few days to spare before exams & vacations, he had given them 2 pages of xeroxed Lucretius [with no notes or vocabulary; this is a bright group of students, but they found it hard going, and some of them didn't have dictionaries, because they have been using editions with glossaries in the back]. When one of the students translated Lucretius' request to Venus as "Give to my words an eternal rabbit" I could not help laughing. They all said that they had the same translation, and when I asked them what, as they had been doing the assignment, they had thought it could possibly *mean*-- they replied [of course] that they were quite used to Latin not making much sense, and that with all those phrases about spring & fertility, they thought it must refer to some Roman custom or sacrifice. Of course I took the opportunity to point out the advantages of paying attention to scansion [since lepus, leporis has a short o and lepor, leporis a long o] and, even more, to a basic principle of reading Latin: if you have found a word with a form that fits but makes no sense, look again. Anyway, the "eternal rabbit" made my day--and led me to wonder if perhaps the de rerum natura is the source for the Energizer Bunny. Cheers, Alice P. Radin .