One of the delights of working at the TLL is discovering the annotations and other scholarly relics left behind by the last century or so of Latinists. While flipping through some ancient glossaries yesterday, I found a copy of a letter from 1934 written by W. M. Lindsay (once “Professor of Humanity” at St Andrews). Lindsay used the occasion of his seventy-sixth birthday to send a volume of ancient glosses to Munich:
I love the specificity of mail method: “parcel-post (registered).” And this worry about adding “quite unsuitable glosses” to the Thesaurus is a reminder of the unavoidable choices at the heart of every lexicographer’s compilations.
This “whimsical notion” borrowed from Plautus is a good joke, too, as I learned after rummaging through some commentaries at work, and here I’ll do my part to ruin the comedy by explaining what’s so funny. (Sorry.) The original lines (Captivi 174–175) read as follows: quia mi est natalis dies / propterea <a> te vocari ad te ad cenam volo. Or roughly in English, “Because today is my birthday, I’d like you to be invited over for dinner at your place.”
The joke, as Lindsay notes in his commentary on the play, is that “the birthday feast was given by the person whose birthday was celebrated. Ergasilus wishes to vary the practice.” Ergasilus wants to have his birthday cake and eat it, too, and he’d rather not foot the baker’s bill.
In his modified version of these lines, Lindsay writes that he’d “like you to accept this gift from me,” preserving Plautus’ antique birthday switcheroo. (I didn’t bother checking if he also somehow preserved that Plautine meter….) But this volume of “suitable” glosses, he assures us, is no gag gift. Good thing, too, since these vocabulary entries, like everything else, find their way into our dictionary.