Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Classics in the news #534

Ann Althouse, guest-blogging for Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, asks, "SHOULDN'T JOURNALISTS APPLAUD the passing of 'Jovian authority'?"

She links to an Oxblog post discussing the death of Peter Jennings, and the NY Times and Washington Post's nostalgia for the once-Olympian authority of the network anchor men.

But, hey, I'm just pumped that journalists are still using words like Jovian in articles that aren't about astronomy.

Maybe there's hope for saturnine, Apollonian, mercurial, and dionysiac.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal editorial page headlined a letter to the editor with this: Si vis pacem, para bellum. And they didn't even provide a translation! They just figured their readers knew what it meant.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You skipped 'venereal'. Of course, journalists who use that word are probably unaware of its etymology.