Some Common Errors in Writing

[C van D]

Of split infinitives, Fowler, Modern English Usage, Oxford University Press, p. 579-80, says: "The English-speaking world may be divided into 1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is 2) those who do not know, but care very much, 3 those who know and condemn, 4) those who know and approve, and 5) those who know and distinguish. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes ..."
Fowler also observes that the prohibition against ending sentences in prepositions is a superstition.

It would have to be a very corrupt manuscript indeed for an illiterate scribe to so mutilate De exsecando testes puerorum ut angeli cantent. Imagine getting the subjunctive right but putting a gerund in the plural as if it were a gerundive even though it is the object of a preposition! If the scribe took such liberties with the title, what must the contents be like?

1) re Fowler: might be worth quoting W.S.Churchill's note on a Civil Service memo "This is the kind of English , up with which I will not put". Cf. the apocryphal story of the Nanny who asked her young charge "What did you choose that book to be read to out of for?"

2) Have you read "Uncle Jack" - so littered with incorrect apostrophes?

3) The wholly spoof MS: I seem to recall a syntactical point called "Gerundive Attraction" - but I may be wrong, because my days of composing Latin prose (verse too) are in the remote past. I will put up my hand for getting the verb Seco in the wrong conjugation.

[YourPhriendlyAuthor]

It would have to be a very corrupt manuscript indeed for an illiterate scribe to so mutilate De exsecando testes puerorum ut angeli cantent. Imagine getting the subjunctive right but putting a gerund in the plural as if it were a gerundive even though it is the object of a preposition! If the scribe took such liberties with the title, what must the contents be like?

Gareth,
Not sure; it's all Greek to me...

-YPA

[C van D]

Gareth,
Not sure; it's all Greek to me...

-YPA

H'm! Puerum Sporum exsectis testibus &c (Well, if I didn't include something about castrating boys, I guess the administrators would disallow the post).

To resume. There are sufficient authorities shown on the Internet to prove that the construction "Legatos miserunt ad pacem petendam" i.e. preposition + noun + gerundive in agreement - is syntactically correct. It is an exact parallel to my "De testibus exsecandis".
It may help if I do an old fashioned "construe" exercise: De = Concerning; Testibus = the testicles; Puerorum = of boys; Exsecandis = being cut out; Quo stands for Ut and introduces a final clause = So that; Cantent = they may sing; Ut = Sicut = Like or As;
Angeli = angels.

Am unsure what the objection was in the first place. I don't see anything in the authorities I've been brushing up on, to say that gerundive attraction doesn't apply where a preposition introduces the phrase.

Finally I'm sure this is all very boring for Members that don't understand - and don't wish to understand, the finer points of Latin prose composition.

Gareth, what are you like on "Balliol Rhymes?"

[pueros]

C van D:-

Si quid dictum est per jocum,
Non aequum est id te serio praevortier!

PUEROS,
whose pseudonym is actually not meant to be a Latin word.