Hic, Haec, Hoax

Stumping the backwoods during one of his presidential campaigns, Andrew Jackson decided to impress his bumpkin constituents with his scholarship, let fly in bear-shaped tones with all the Latin he knew: "E pluribus unum, my friends, sine qua non, ne plus ultra, multo in parvo!" Applause resounded for miles; Jackson not only won the election, but also got an honorary LL.D. Or so says Allen Walker Read, associate professor of English at Columbia University, who tucked tongue in cheek and presented choice samples of fractured Latin in an address to the Linguistic Society of America.

In 1832, recounts Read, a Canadian sheriff who lost a culprit in a bog swore out a warrant, explaining that the offender "non est comeatibus in swampo." By 1841 the mock Latin for "will not come out of the swamp" was widely accepted backwoods legal terminology for "unavailable." An Illinois tavern keeper posted notice of a delinquent barfly who disappeared without paying his tab: "Non est inventus ad libitum scape goatum non comeatibus in swampo. Ergo, non catchibus, non prosecutibus, non tryabus, non chastisibus."

Read resurrects an evocative fragment of verse:

"Patres conscripti--took a boat and went to Philippi.

Trumpeter unus erat qui coatum scarlet habebat,

Stormum surgebat, et boatum oversetebat,

Omnes drownerunt, quia swimaway non potuerunt,

Excipe John Periwig, tied up to the tail of a dead pig."

And he records two vivid and poignant modern samples of ravaged Roman: General Stilwell's World War II motto, "Illegitimati non carborundum [Don't let the bastards grind you down],' and Adlai Stevenson's classic cry of anguish, "Via oviciptum dura est [The way of the egghead is hard]."

Probably wisely, he omits mention of the venerable schoolboy yockibus:

Brutus: Well, how did you like that pizza last night?

Caesar: Et tu, Brute.

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