View from the North 40: Just say it, plain and simple

One of the hardest things to do is to say exactly what you mean in a way that people understand exactly what you mean. No one knows that better today than the good-intentioned people at New Jersey’s Moorestown Township Library.

They tried to say exactly what they meant, only they said it in Latin, which was their first mistake. Latin is, of course, a dead language, and the dead don’t say much of anything useful. Maybe they can with a ouija board or through a spangled gypsy woman reading a crystal ball. But I wouldn't count on it in Latin.

The second mistake was letting the new library’s architect and town leaders come up with the new motto: “We confirm things twice.” Because picking a motto like that is just setting yourself up for an embarrassing error.

And that leaves the third mistake squarely on the shoulders of whoever translated that motto into dead Latin. That person was dead wrong.

CBS Philly, on its Philadelphia.CBSlocal.com website, reported Sunday that after almost 12 years of construction, the town’s multi-million dollar library opened to rave reviews ... until residents started searching for the meaning of the Latin motto engraved into stone medallions that were inset into the libraries brick walls.

Someone did not confirm that translation even once.

Apparently inquiring minds of the residents used Google Translate to discover that the Latin engraved in the medallions — “Nos Secundus Coniecto Omnia — translates to “We second-guess all.”

Not right, but I think the dead came pretty close to at least coming up with something useable. It’s not a bad motto.

I might even have accepted some claim from the translators that the motto was supposed to read that way, but — you knew there had to be a but to this story — there was also that other Latin debacle. The number-related one.

Another stone medallion on the wall is supposed show that the Friends of the Library organization was established in “1853.” But, it actually says “1653.” There is no explaining that one away. That’s 200 years — a lot can happen in the stretch of 200 years.

With a healthy instinct to second-guess everything and use research to confirm things twice, CBS reporter Steve Patterson consulted Joseph Farrell, professor of classical studies and all-around language authority at University of Pennsylvania to double check the results.

“It's not real Latin, but a kind of pseudo-Latin called ‘dog Latin’ in which you just translate each individual English word into a Latin equivalent, without worrying whether the result makes sense or not,” Farrell said about the incorrect translation.

That makes sense because if you use Google Translate to turn Farrell’s one-sentence statement into Latin, you get: “At non, latine autem genus pseudo-latinum dicitur canis Latine interpretati sunt, in tantum, quod in singulis Anglorum Latinum verbum sine laniatisque sive per sensum sive non.”

And then translate that back into English you get: “It’s not, in Latin, a Latin version, however, they are kind of a dog is said to be the pseudo-Latin, to such an extent, that in every detail without worrying whether it be by the sense of the English word of Latin or not.”

I could not have said it better myself, or as the Google re-translator says it: Is no more I am, he says, the preferred choice to me.

(Wait, what? at [email protected].)