A reader in California, Anna, suggested that bloggers need a motto, something like "watching the watchers," and asked if I would translate it into Latin. That goes into Latin pretty easily:
Custodientes custodesand it has the added advantage of alluding to Juvenal's famous question,
Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("who will watch the watchers themselves?").A second motto Anna suggested was was "publish, then verify." But I'm not exactly sure what that means in English, so I'm hesitant to put it into Latin. Specifically, does it mean that bloggers publish, then verify their stuff later? Or that the MSM publishes, and bloggers verify it?
4 comments:
In English please, dm. Some of us are not so hot at the dead language stuff.
As for "Publish, then Verify", it is more of an empiricism than a motto. But if we are to "Say what we do and do what we say" - which is the first step in developing standards - it is painfully appropriate.
Carl, I had noticed (and liked) the ambiguity of *custodientes custodes* too, though to my mind the word order tips toward an accusative reading of *custodes*, since Latin tends toward SOV or SVO, but not generally VS. Another way of disambiguating would be to quote Juvenal more fully: *custodientes custodes ipsos.*
But the gerund is also nice.
Anna -- the quotation from Seneca means, "whatever was said well by someone else is mine." It brings to mind T. S. Elliot's famous quip, "bad poets borrow; good poets steal."
Interesting that this comment dialog came up in French for me...
My late partner was a journalist and marketer, and "Publish, then verify," if an empiricism, is one of disparagement.
It would be akin to the saw, "It is easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission." Methinks that it is intended largely to deride whomever publishes without *first* verifying. (Where is the line between "just the facts" and "getting the scoop at the expense of the truth"?)
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