Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Going Commando with the Ancient Romans

Celebrating with the graduate Sunday, somebody came up with the cute idea of stuffing little fortune cookies of advice into a jar, and letting him glean wisdom. One such offering was:

semper ubi sub ubi

...translated for the multitude of yokels as "always wear underwear." It apparently qualifies as part of the culture--there is an Urban Dictionary entry; there is a blog. And evidently it figured in an episode of Frasier. But it appears that machine-driven translators are slow to get the joke. Ask InterTran to English "semper ubi sub ubi" and you get

always when up to, under when

Which is not a hell of a lot of help. Ask it to Latinize "always wear underwear," and you get:

usquequaque gero underwear

Which ought to settle things once and for all.

1 comment:

William F. Glennon said...

subligacula semper gerenda (or trahenda) sunt.

or semper oportet nos subligacula gerere