macaronic wordplay

[Joel S. Berson]

Another bit of vertical moronic word play from the Harvard
campus:  Scattered around are emergency phones to reach the Harvard
police.  The poles have vertical lettering, which often has been
defaced to read
C
A
L
L

F
O
R

A
S
S

S
T
A
N
C
E

Joel

At 12/28/2008 03:58 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
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>
>I guess it's because I learned my Latin as (pause to count on fingers)
>my 3rd language, in H.S., with Classical pronunciation. And living in
>Mass. for 20 years I was plenty exposed to Harvard and their shield
>saying
>  VER
>   IT
>  AS
>which I always thought of with the /w/.
>
>That shield probably also conditioned me -- and p'raps Ms. Dickinson
>as well -- to breaking it up that exact way (which I didn't think to
>mention before).
>
>Mark Mandel
>
>
>On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Laurence Horn
><laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> >
> > At 11:38 AM -0500 12/28/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
> > >Heard on the weekend on, I think, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", after
> > >something about a Harvard basketball team, from Amy Dickinson:
> > >
> > >"As it were -- that's their motto."
> > >
> > >And I went
> > >    tick... tick... BOOM!
> > >as (to mix metaphors) the penny dropped:
> > >
> > >1. Harvard's motto, "Veritas", in the classical pronunciation: /'wEritas/
> > >2. Split and reverse order: "as it were"
> > >
> > >Mark Mandel
> > >
> > This one really puzzled me on first read-through, partly because of
> > the obscurity of the algorithm (pronounce as in classical Latin,
> > which Harvard's motto rarely is, and then reverse order of syllables
> > and treat each as an English word?) and partly because I read it as
> > having been observed by *Emily* Dickinson, who wouldn't have been a
> > close follower of Harvard basketball.  Whatever.
> >
> > LH
>
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------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org