Phrase of the Day: “nolo episcopari” (bis)

This Latin gem is a marvel of morphological compression. 

First, the auxiliary verb, nolo.  The prefixal n- is negative (as in German); it joins with volo ‘want’ to form a composite exactly analogous to earlier English nill (which survives as a fossil, invisible save to adepts of etymological geology, in willy-nilly).   You are probably familiar with this modal verb in the expression from ‘law Latin’, nolo contendere, the plea of ‘No contest’.   A present participle of the same verb appears in the Latin equivalent of willy-nilly (used in many languages including English), nolens volens.   The imperative appears in the Vulgate version of the celebrated words of Christ to the Magdalene, noli me tangere.  And finally, again from English law Latin, this time with the auxiliary itself in the infinitive:  nolle prosequi, literally ‘not to wish to pursue (the matter)’,  for when a prosecutor drops a case.

Noli me tangere

Episcopari is a verb from a Greek root meaning literally ‘over-seer’ and which is the etymon of our word bishop (a phonetically much-mutilated remains), here inflected for passive.   The resulting phrase then means, “I do not wish to be made a bishop”;  and it is, traditionally, exactly the attitude required of a candidate for an episcopacy.

Julius Caesar  refusing the crown

People being what we are, the phrase is often used ironically, to indicate that the lips and the heart are at odds.
But -- What if the fellow genuinely does not want that?   I was reminded of this (rare) situation in happening upon the following passage:

After an election in the sixteenth century,

le supérieur général des dominicains, une fois élu, déclara qu’il avait mieux à faire que d’exercer le pouvoir, et s’en retourna à ces chères études.

-- Jean Lacouture, Jésuites (1991), p. 116

To preclude such an awkward situation, General William Tecumseh Sherman, mooted as a candidate for President, famously stated:  “If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

Further philological footnote:  Passive infinitives are familiar from other phrases of law Latin, e.g. certiorari (passive of certiorare).   And indeed the prosequi in nolle prosequi is sort of a passive infinitive -- strictly, the infinitive of a deponent (passive in form, active in meaning) -- though morphologically it is very odd, lacking the characteristic -r- of the an infinitive active or passive.  (As though to atone for this, the finite form in the first person singular  gets one:  sequor  ‘I pursue’.)

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A predecessor from pagan antiquity:

Plato’s  rulers were to be given absolute power  only upon the condition that they did not want it.

-- Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930)

She notes the parallel to “nolo episcopari”

A parallel from pagan modernity:  In his trenchant essay "The Inner Circle", C.S. Lewis recalls the motto of boys at English "public schools":

"Them as asks,  shan't have."

~

The morphology of episcopari is, as we remarked, that of a passive infinitive (a category which the daughter languages sadly lack), exactly like that of percipi in Bishop Berkeley’s classic phrase.

We had latterly to remark, in our note upon that maxim, that waggish rascal Fielding’s proclivity for turning Latin tags to his own account;  and he once again does so here, while describing the courtship by the Captain, for the wealthy heiress’ hand: 

He soon found means to make his addresses, in express terms, to his mistress, from whom he received an answer in the proper form, viz:  the answer which was first made some thousands of years ago, and which hath been handed down by tradition  from mother to daughter  ever since.  If I was to translate this into Latin, I should render it by these two words:  Nolo episcopari.
-- Tom Jones (1749)

Meaning:  She replied coyly, playing hard to get;  but was quite willing, with proper plying, and after a decent interval, to be … gotten.

(Note: mistress here means, ‘mistress-in-prospect’;  and that, in a quite respectable sense.)

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"Were I alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I should be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

('Tis I, Henry Fielding, and I approved this merry message.)

~         ~

~

[Update May 2017]  There are actually a wealth of epigrams, illustrating the basic thesis that some things can be achieved only indirectly, the wording varying depending upon what is being aimed at:

  No man who cares about originality
  will ever be original.

  -- C.S. Lewis, radio address

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Esse est percipi (redivivus ter)

“To be is to be perceived” -- Bishop Berkeley
[corresponding to the Latin   esse est percipi, pronounced ESS-ay est pare-KIP-ee.  Percipi is the passive infinitive, a delightful category, which does not exist in any of the other languages with which I am conversant.]

“We call a real dynamical variable whose eigenstates form a complete set   an observable.”  -- Paul Dirac

“To be  is to be the value of a variable.”  --  W.V.O. Quine

*

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am Bishop Berkeley, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

Three radically different takes on  being and seeing.

(Cf. "Seeing is believing" -- vs. Berkeley:  Being seen  is being.)

The first and most famous of the epigrams above  applies to the ontology of basic objects, such as coffee-cups -- about which no plain man has any doubts whatsoever.   (Quine's quip  will, however, frequently detain us further;  e.g. here.)

A related but different question  concerns things which, unlike a coffee-cup or its relativistic mass, you cannot directly perceive -- though someone else might.

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. I, p. 17, re the views of G.E. Moore:

For things presented in space, but not things to be met with in space, to exist is to be perceived.  That is, afterimages .. and pains  can only exist when they are perceived or experienced.

Or, classically,  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

A psychological vice ontological version of Bekeley’s epigram, is the vernacular “Out of sight, out of mind.”  (Cf. French, "Si tu te tais, ni vu ni connu.")  Or, as Fielding wittily put it in Tom Jones,

De non apparentibus, et non existentibus,

eadem est ratio. -- In English, ‘When a woman is not seen to blush, she doth not blush at all.’ 

(Lawfolk interpret this Latin tag more prosaically:  “What is not juridically presented cannot be judicially decided.”   Spoilsports.)

~

A noted intuitionist philosopher, anent “the celebrated [loathsome, leprotic -- ed.] thesis that mathematical statements do not relate to an objective mathematical reality  existing independently of us”, writes that, on such a view, to be is to be conceived:

Unlike material objects,  mathematical objects are, on this thesis, creations of the human mind.  They are objects of thought, not merely in the sense that they can be thought about, but in the sense that their being is to be thought of [or rather, thought into existence -- ed.];  for them, esse est concipi.

-- Michael Dummett,  “ The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic”, in: Truth and other enigmas (1978), p.  228

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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The above is really just a placeholder post, reminding me to someday address the deeper problem of observables.   This may never happen.  To begin with, even in the simplest quantum-mechanical case, an observable is an operator on Hilbert space, so you have to wrap your mind around that.  With some luck and some study, that might be doable.  But just now I encountered the following dismaying sentence:

In quantum field theory, unlike in quantum mechanics, position is not an observable.

I may well have retired to my hamster farm, before ever figuring such things out.

In the meantime, some further thoughts about ontology  here.

~

Bonus quote:

  How do you know you’re having fun  if there’s no one watching you have it?

  --Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe (1980).

~

Visitors to the site have enquired about the pronunciation of the classic Latin phrase “esse est percipi”.   About this (although I used to be editor of pronunciation at Merriam-Webster, back in the day) I have so far had nothing to say.  Embarrassed, I messaged my colleague and comrade Dr. Keith Massey (officially out of comms, but reachable in the bush), as follows:

More than once, someone has searched the blog via
   pronounce esse est percipi
-- alas in vain.  In my head, I have always pronounced this pear-KIP-ee, but, given that the vowel is short, the Latin would be more like PEAR-kip-ee, no?
Or rather, the Vulgar Latin, since Latin itself, being quantitative, lacked phonemic lexical stress.  Correct so far?
A second question is how philosophers in various countries pronounce it -- anglicized, frenchified, etc.

Swifter than lightning, our colleague replied:

In classical Latin the C is always pronounced as a K. But we don't know when the thing started to change before E and I. I suspect it was already being realized regionally as something else in the Late Imperial period. And speakers of Latin dialects took to pronouncing their classical Latin as if it were their living register. And so, in France,  percipi was pronounced “persipee”. In Italy perchipee, and in Spanish pershipee (attested still in Ladino) and later, in Iberia as perthipee, and, yet later in the New World, as persipee.

Accent in Latin is a hotly debated topic. I personally follow the view that the classical accent is unknowable and therefore all we have to work from is the living dialects and the rules of Ecclesiastical Latin. And so, penultimate except in a few cases. Accent falls in the syllable before -ibus. But I'd say perCIPee.

As for Anglo-Latin, this is an exciting topic. There's some evidence that a Romance language survived in the Isles for a several centuries after the withdrawal of forces in 380. It apparently, from inscriptional evidence, turned long E into a long I, fecit --> feecit. The way we pronounce phrases like Habeas Corpus may actually be representative of the pronounciation of Anglo-Romance, rather than a later scholastic recasting.

Those further interested in this topic can consult the essay by Thomas Pyles, “The Pronunciation of Latin in English:  A Lexicographical Dilemma”, reprinted in his Selected essays on English usage (1979).  Executive summary:  The history is so tangled, it is now an unresolvable mess.

In his “Tempest in Teapot: Reform in Latin Pronunciation”, reprinted in the same volume, Pyles quotes an amusing epigram that alludes to what became of Latin in Spain, where original v and b merged into a bilabial fricative:

~ Felix natio, ubi vivere est bibere ~

[Variant: "o felix iberia, ubi vivere est bibere"]

For further adventures in pronunciation, click here. 

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Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

Distinguishing discontinuous state-reduction (which he dubs R) from linear evolution as per the Schrödinger equation -- i.e., the “collapse of the wave-function” upon “observation”, a mathematician remarks:

I do not mean to imply that the experimenter deliberately sets up a ‘measurement’ to achieve this.  … Nature herself is continually enacting R-process effects,  without any deliberate intentions on the part of an experimenter or any intervention by a ‘conscious observer’.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 593

Thus achieving the esse of percipi  ‘naturally’ (vacuously).

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Frontiers of Feminism

From Freud’s letter to his fiancée, 1885, describing the scene on the Champs-Elysées:

Die nobeln Damen gehen dort  mit einer Miene  spazieren, als wollten sie  die Existenz der Welt, ausser sich und ihren Männern,  leugnen  oder doch  gütigst übersehen.

 ~

(This will probably get me disinvited to high tea at Bryn Mawr, but c'est la vie.  As well be hanged  for a sheep  as a lamb.)

Meet the world’s richest woman!

Gina Rinehart, the world's richest woman

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-richest-woman-20120830,0,3323996.story

Just in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.

"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."Myess ... , let them eat cake.

Cake is for our kind.  Let them eat Twinkies.

Aloft she bears  her towering head,

filled with conceit  of her own pre-eminence

-- Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)

Rinehart made her money the old-fashioned way: She inherited it. Her family iron ore prospecting fortune of $30.1 billion makes her Australia's wealthiest person and the richest woman on the planet.

"There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire," she said by way of encouragement.

Just in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.

"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."

You… can’t … make…. this… stuff …  up ………….
You… can’t … make…. this… stuff …  up ………….

For her plebeian soulmate, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-gluttony-of-delicacy.html 

And now for something completely different:
         In Praise of Dames

[Update 5 Sept 2012]

Can't make this stuff up, folks, so I won't even try.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-richest-woman-pay-20120905,0,6971046.story

She's back: World's richest woman makes case for $2-a-day pay

[Update 11 Sept]  Further Antoinettery:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-politicians-fail-to-connect-with-the-poor/2012/09/10/cc3a61fc-fb66-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html?hpid=z3

Ann Romney doesn’t understand poverty

Someone who appreciated the plight of the poor would not have trivialized it with campy stories from her let’s-pretend past.

~

As background to one of his dreams, Sigmund Freud recounts (in Traumdeutung) a railway journey  he once endured;  appropriate, that, since literary depictions of Strangers-on-a-Train  invariably partake of the oneiric.

Anyhow, the train was packed, and he was obliged (with appropriate excuses) to insert himself into a cabin already occupied by a married couple.   They frostily snubbed him;  and the wife placed her umbrella on the window-seat across from her, so as to bar it to the intruder.

So far so good (bad);  but then Freud offers  a curious general psychosociological observation, of the sort that is rare in his writings:

Nach meinen Reiseerfahrungen  kennzeichnet ein so rücksichtslos übergreifendes Benehmen  Leute, die ihre Karte nicht  oder nur halb bezahlt haben.  Als der Konducteur kam, und ich mein teurer erkauftes Billet vorzeigte, tönte es aus dem Munde der Dame  unnahbar und wie drohend:  Mein Mann hat Legitimation.

(One of the symbols of sociopolitical corruption in America around a hundred years ago, was the railroad pass, handed out to curry favor with the influential.  Apparently Austro-Hungary had rather the same thing.)

With her, as with Gina Rinehart:  The men who, by their own efforts and sweat, make their first million, are often ornery enough; but their widows and heiresses  are insufferable.

~

We had thought to have done;  yet, unexpectedly,  some pages later, Freud recurs to this dream:  and this, in a very strange way.   The context is the unearthing of what is concealed in dreams -- more precisely, how the analyst may be led to the nub, when the patient

(a) upon being bidden to repeat the account of the dream, recounts a certain passage with transmogrified wording,

(b) suddenly recalls a passage of the dream  previously unrelated.

(In this case, the patient is himself.)

First, the not-so-strange part (apart from the strangeness  of recurring to it at all):

Es ist dies ein Reisetraum,  der Rache nimmt  an zwei unliebenswürdigen Reisegefährten, den ich  wegen seines  zum Teil  grobunflätigen Inhaltes  fast ungedeutet gelassen habe.

So:  This roughly corresponds to condition (b).

He goes on:

Das ausgelassene Stück  lautet:  Ich sage auf ein Buch von Schiller:  It is from … Korrigiere mich aber, den Irrtum selbst bemarkend, It is by … Der Mann bemarket hieraut  zu seiner Schwester:  “Er hat es ja richtig gesagt.”

So much is straightforward:  The dream-judgment jibes with that of any experienced translator;  and, for reasons that Freud outlines, the slight initial mistranslation  is quite understandable.

-- At this point, we should, on the face of it, remove the discussion to some other post, unconnected with the (ostensibly) political business  with which we began.    But in the Freudian spirit of  things connected to other things, we shall leave the thread lie.

Freud then recounts an incident from the vacation in England, connected with that train-ride, as, at the seaside,

ein reizendes kleines Mädchen  zu mir trat  und mich fragte:  Is that a starfish?  Is it alive?  Ich antwortete:  Yes he is alive;  schämte mich aber dann der Inkorrektheit, und wiederholte der Satz richtig.

(I.e., changing “he” to “it”.)  Followers of this blog  will readily understand,  that in our estimation, Freud, als Dolmetscher, was right the first time;  but that is probably (not necessarily, but probably) nothing to the point.

What is to the point … well, must be left to our death-bed;  some things are simply ‘compartmented’, so to speak.

Freud’s writings go deep, or at least they try to.  And generally, you can follow his thought, though the reasoning may fall short of compelling assent.  But at this point, he loses me completely (le miel sur les lèvres).   After an obvious remark about the two meanings of ‘gender’ (das Geschlechtswort / das Geschlechtliche), he states:

Dies ist allerdings  einer der Schlüssel zur Lösung des Traumes.

and then (to my bafflement) appends cases of  Mo ~ Ma, as in “Matter and Motion”.  The Spanish values of the respective vowels  would be masculine ~ feminine;  but there he loses me;  I find no such key syllable in the dream which, suitably switched-out, yields the Traumgedanke.  (Other ideas suggest themselves, yet these too proved fruitless.)  Uniquely, he leaves the solution as ‘an exercise for the reader’ (“der wird sich das Fehlende  leicht ergänzen können”).