pulchra puella It's literally the only phrase I remember from my freshman Latin class in high school.
Oh, wait, I do have another one. I use it all the time at work. When you see a translation with a (sic) inserted between words, that's short for sic erat scriptum, which means thus it was written. It's used to denote that what appears to be an error in the translated product is actually a reflection of an error that was present in the original text. In legal climes, such errors are never sanitized out, but represented as is, with the (sic). Though I know exactly what the Latin phrase means, translators typically engage that term as garbage in, garbage out.
Fiat justitia ruat caelum - Let justice be done though the heavens fall - written over the door of my law school. Not sure I agree with it in general, but I think it's a pretty good motto for a lawyer!
Not exactly a quote but I do like saying "Ave Amicus" (Hail friend) to my buds. This one, Divide et impera: divide and conquer, was taught to me by my high school debate teacher. He always stressed the importance of dividing up an argument, and conquering each divided part to destroy it. Or something like that. Its been awhile....
Well - I think it would be a pretty bad thing if the heavens actually fell, so... while I value justice, I'm not sure I put it above all things, you know?
Pulchra puella just means "pretty girl". It's not a quotable phrase or anything of that ilk. Just one of those things that stuck in my head from a random class a billion years ago, the rest of which has long since been erased from the internal hard-drive.
Sure. I once translated a police report wherein the cop noted an item found at the scene of a car jacking. It was a bracelet. The cop noted, in the official report, written in her own hand in Spanish, that the bracelet was made of "etemletÃl". You have to know and understand the phonemic tendencies of Caribbean Spanish and the manner in which anglicisms are ported into the language, and how they are often passed through a real meat grinder. Though the cop wrote it as one word, and even went so far as to try to ratify it with an accent mark over the final I (also not correct according to the standard rules of when and where to place accent marks in Spanish), it's actually two words that the cop has joined through a process known as juncture loss. Here's the process to get back to the original thing in question: etemletÃl etemle tÃl estemles stÃl stainless steel Here's the kicker. There's a perfectly valid, utterly common term for that in Spanish: acero inoxidable. But that's not what she wrote, not by a mile. So the translated copy has that a bracelet was found at the scene made of "etemletÃl"1 (sic), ten feet from, blah, blah, blah... And then there's a translator's note at the end that the most likely meaning of that piece of prior word-garbage is stainless steel.
I've always passively wondered about this, but never bothered to look it up, so thanks! One of the ones that pops up in my profession frequently is PRN medication. PRN stands for Pro Re Nata which means as need arises (or similar). So when someone gets PRN medication, it is as needed.
BTW, and just to be thorough, it's not just translators who use it. If a piece of text shows up as a quote in another text, but both are the same original language, and there's an error in the original, a (sic) can also be used, depending on how rigorous the receiving venue is. Outside of the legal world, rules can change depending on the demands of the client. Here's where the (sic) gets dicey, though. Some documents - like extradition requests - live a very back and forth kind of life between two sovereign nations. I've had to translate ones where a translator on the other side of the linguistic equation noted a (sic), but then there didn't appear to be any error it was denoting. Sometimes translators take the paradigm a little too far and a simple spelling error in the source language will get noted with a (sic) in the translation, but the spelling error itself isn't representable because the word is not the same in the target language and you don't just make up a bogus spelling error in its place. So, I've had this conversation: "Hello, AUSA Rodriguez. How are you. Fine, thank you for asking. I'm calling because I'm working on this response to an extradition request for (insert case name) and there's a sic noted that has no discernible error. Would you prefer that I sic the sic our just leave the one sic. Okay. Understood. Will do. You have a nice day as well, ma'am. I should have this to you by C.O.B. today."
There is a certain public figure who is noted for, among other things, his use of Twitter, and I've been amused to see that media have given up on inserting (sic) when he engages in non-standard spelling and grammar. But generally I was taught that (sic) is a way of making sure the teacher doesn't mark the error as yours if you're quoting from something else.
I took an African-American lit class a while back, Harlem Renaissance- Present or something. This dude asked me to look over his paper for him because I have a moderately good understanding of grammar. So he handed me his paper and in every single quote he used from the short story Tell Martha Not to Moan, he had (sic) to denote that the grammatical errors were not his own. That story was written in a not-so-heavy-handed dialect, making use of the spoken vernacular. I found it hilarious that his paper was littered with comma splices and fragments, missing punctuation, but didn’t miss a single purposeful error in the quoted story.
Come to think of it, just last week I read an article in one of the major papers (WaPo I think) where they had corrected that individual's idiosyncatic spelling without noting that they'd done so. I was actually rather upset about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori Interesting stuff in here, worth a read if you like that kind of thing. Or if bored!
This is the most common latin expression I've found in sci-fi books I've read: "Caveat Emptor" Took me half a day to understand what it means. (I refused to look for it in Google for some sick reason it's not important now)
