VERSUM TERSUM: Limericks for LOVERS of CLASSIC LANGUAGES

SATIRE COMPOSED: Giorgio Coniglio, September 2018. The involved verses have been published at OEDILF.com, an online humor dictionary that has accumulated over 100,000 carefully edited limericks.

Authors' Note:

mus (MOOS): Latin for ‘mouse’

puer (POO-er): 'boy', a prototype Latin noun, often used in early lessons to introduce the topic of declension

faex: Latin for 'dreg', 'sediment' or 'deposit'

faeces: the more familiar plural form

The author has several decades of experience in attempting to get trainees who had never studied Latin to use Anglo-Latin words appropriately in medical reports. 

Presumably, Linnaeus' associates and protégés in 18th century Swedish academia were all well-versed in Latin.

Authors' Note: 

gigeria: Latin term for the delicacy 'cooked bird entrails'; forerunner of the old French term gisier, from which our use of gizzard is derived

garum: highly popular Roman sauce made from fermented fish intestines, used equivalently to our catsup

Gourmands in ancient Rome were notorious for their consumption of exotic (and in modern terms yukky) foods of all sorts

Authors' Note: Our seer in Byzántion likely made his prediction in the early 4th century A.D.

Byzántion: Greek name for the Greek colonial city-state founded on the Bosporus in pre-Roman times; known in Latin as Byzantium, it lent its name to the subsequent Byzantine Empire

Konstantinoúpolis, and Constantinopolis: Greek and Latin names respectively for the expanded city, planned as his empire's eastern capital (Nova Roma) by Roman emperor Constantine; known in English as Constantinople

Hagia Sophia (ah-yah so-FEE-ah) Greek for Holy Wisdom; famed for its huge dome, the third iconic church built on the site served as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral from 537 A.D. until 1453, the year of conquest by the Ottoman Turks

Istanbul: capital of the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently of modern Turkey, the city's current population of 15 million (2017) makes it Europe's most populous city.

Authors' Note: In its earlier versions, the Hebrew alphabet was a pure abjad, or consonantary, with over twenty consonants, but no vowel sounds. The modern script used today has five symbols which may assist in the vocalization of vowels. In certain specific usages (poetry, teaching children, studying ancient texts, books of prayer used in the diaspora), a system of diacritic marks under the letters indicates the standardized vowel sounds. Without them, as in the majority of informal printed texts and in handwriting, you have to know some grammar, and have a moderate vocabulary of root words (often consisting of three consonants) to solve the meaning.   

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