Pylimitics

Words and language are a sort of fashion just as subject to fads and not-necessarily-sensible ideas as to what colors are “in” and what one “simply must” wear. One linguistic fashion that’s appeared once or twice in English is the desire to sound more Latin. 

Everybody knows — or at least they should — that a large number of English words originated in Latin. Latin has for centuries had snob appeal in European and North American culture. “Sure,” people said, “it’s all well and good to learn to read and write in English, but you’re not really part of the SMART set until you can read and write in Latin.” And just to show off how cool the Latin-literate kids were — or more likely, to show off how cool the wannabe Latin-literate kids were — some English words were actually changed in order to make them sound “more like Latin.” 

“Venom” for example, seems to end in “m” because the language fad of the day (that day being centuries ago in England) was that ending in “m” just sounded Latin-ish. Never mind that “venom” really is derived from Latin, where it’s “venin.” “Pilgrim” got the same treatment; it, too is a Latin derivative (from “pelegrinus,” where you might notice it doesn’t end in “m”). 

Nobody really knows whether linguistic fads and fashions in those elder days — not to mention pseudo-academic snobbery — extended also to what you would be writing your (Latin, of course) about or what tools you use. The choices in the olden days were nowhere near as varied as ours today. They didn’t have the option of looking down your nose at anybody actually using Microsoft Word. To write something, they might even have had to make their own ink. By the way, looking down one’s nose at Microsoft Word users is actually a thing. In the academic world TeX is the gold standard, while in business it’s generally been whatever system is much more complex and expensive than Word — Adobe InDesign, MadCap Flare, or FrameMaker might be the snobby choice today. Or Google Docs, of course, except that’s a lot easier to use than Word. In the days of yore, snobbery might have surrounded the kind of parchment one used. There was goatskin, onionskin, and vellum, which was the best. Vellum was calfskin — the Latin for “calf” is “vitulus.” That also yielded the Old French word “veel,” which entered English as “veal.” And “of calf” in Latin was “vitulinum,” which became the Old French “velin,” which in English was changed to “vellum” — ending in “m” because everybody knew that made it sound more like Latin. And at least in this case, the Latin root really did end in “m.”

Nowadays, whether your work is written in Latin or English, entered via Microsoft Word or TeX (or Notepad), you can still print it on vellum, goatskin, or onionskin. But of course these days “onionskin” has nothing to do with onions, “goatskin” is a goat-free archival paper (which, by the way, Queen Elizabeth’s speeches were printed on), and “vellum” has nothing to do with any animal products at all. It’s still a fancy paper, of course; very nice finish and treated to make it look — well, more “classical.” Interesting that the word “vellum” and the artifact itself both have actual classical roots, but in their current form have been altered to look more like they have classical roots. The roots were always there; I guess they just didn’t show.