Kinda incongruous, huh? If there were more Latin speakers around I might have to revise that position ;).
It's funny, actually -- there's this thing, the Loeb Classical Library, which is totally indispensable for classics students. They're volumes of the classical corpus with the Latin or Greek on one side and an English translation on the other. The series is around a century old, iirc, so the translations pass through some really different styles and mores. If you get one of the older ones, and it has a scandalous Latin passage, the facing-page translation will be English...until the scandalous part...when it is in Italian. I guess they figured, if you're sufficiently educated, you can handle it, but we must keep the radioactive language segregated from the unwashed masses. I think there's something similar with dirty Greek passages being translated into Latin. (The result, of course, is mature, highly educated grad students huddled together in the classics library snickering.)
In this particular case, though, the phrase I used is a direct and famous quote. It's not *my* dirty thoughts, per se ;). But yes, I do have strong inhibitions against using certain English obscene vocabulary, which entirely illogically do not seem to apply to Latin.
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It's funny, actually -- there's this thing, the Loeb Classical Library, which is totally indispensable for classics students. They're volumes of the classical corpus with the Latin or Greek on one side and an English translation on the other. The series is around a century old, iirc, so the translations pass through some really different styles and mores. If you get one of the older ones, and it has a scandalous Latin passage, the facing-page translation will be English...until the scandalous part...when it is in Italian. I guess they figured, if you're sufficiently educated, you can handle it, but we must keep the radioactive language segregated from the unwashed masses. I think there's something similar with dirty Greek passages being translated into Latin. (The result, of course, is mature, highly educated grad students huddled together in the classics library snickering.)
In this particular case, though, the phrase I used is a direct and famous quote. It's not *my* dirty thoughts, per se ;). But yes, I do have strong inhibitions against using certain English obscene vocabulary, which entirely illogically do not seem to apply to Latin.