April 9, 2020


I got distracted by the learned Michael Gilleland’s discussion of the compound word gaudivigens’ which is apparently a hapax legomenon; he found it in the inscription:

Stallius Gaius has sedes Hauranus tuetur,
ex Epicureio gaudiuigente choro.

I’m not sure about the Epicurean band; it sounds like the kind of thing that gives you a splitting headache, but gaudivigens’ (defined by Lewis and Short as alive with joy”) is such a great word, it makes you want to run out and compose hexameters!!***

He notes though that it does not appear in the Oxford Latin Dictionary,” although the inscription dates from the first century B.C., well before the OLDs cutoff of ca. 200 A.D. Otto Gradenwitz, Laterculi vocum Latinarum: voces Latinas et a fronte et a tergo ordinandas (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1904), p. 486, lists gaudivigens but no other compounds ending in -vigens.”

*** How come I haven’t met anyone like Anne Fadiman’s friend, the one she describes in Words on a Flyleaf, who writes book inscriptions to women in exquisite dactylic hexameter?

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