Ultracrepidarianism is giving opinions on subjects that you know nothing about, and is thus a terribly useful word. Ultracrepidarian was introduced into English by the essayist William Hazlitt, but it goes back to an ancient story about the great Greek painter Apelles.
The story goes that Apelles used to leave his new paintings out on public display and then hide behind a pillar to hear people's reactions. One day he overheard a cobbler pointing out that Apelles had painted a shoe all wrong. So he took the painting away, corrected the shoe and put it out on display again.
The cobbler came back, saw that Apelles had taken his advice and was so proud and puffed up with conceit that he had made the great painter change a detail that he started talking loudly about what was wrong with the leg; at which point Apelles jumped out from his hiding place and shouted: ne sutor ultra crepidam, which approximately translates as the cobbler should go no further than the shoe. Thus ultracrepidiarian is beyond-the-shoe.
Anybody wishing to know my opinions on baseball, carpentry or Pop Idol should send a stamped self-addressed envelope somewhere else.
The fingers are the digits and are therefore used for counting. Thus did digits become numbers and when information is stored in numbers it becomes digital.
The Old English names for the fingers are much more fun than those which have been more recently fangled.
The index finger was once the towcher, or toucher, because it was used for touching things. We non-tactile moderns no longer use this finger for touching things and instead only point at, or indicate them. Hence index finger.
Though you may, dear reader, run your inky index finger down the index of a book, that's not where the name comes from. Like a co-owned onion, they merely share a root.
The index of a book indicates where a passage may be found (and the index expurgatorius indicates where the good, dirty stuff is). From this idea of indicating come all the other dull and dreary stock market and scientific indices.
The dully-named middle finger was, to our forbears the fool's finger, but not, alas, because it was covered in ink. Instead we got the name from the Romans who called it the digitus infamis (infamous), obscenus (obscene), and impudicus (rude). Nobody is sure why the Romans bore such a grudge against the middle finger, but it seems that it was they who invented the habit of sticking it up at those they did not like.
Rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum dixerit et digitum porrigito medium
Which translates extraordinarily loosely as:
If you are called a poof don't pause or linger But laugh and show the chap your middle finger.
What do leeches have to do with love? A leech is an old metonym for a doctor, and doctors are interested in the heart. Because it was believed that there was a nerve that ran from the fourth finger to the heart, doctors thought that they could influence the one through the other. Lovers believe that by putting a ring around the fourth finger they had, so to speak, lassoed the loved one's heart. And that's how the leech finger became the ring finger.
And the little finger? It was called the ear-finger. Why? Because it's just the right size for digging wax from your shell-like.
Professor Kathryn Sutherland, who, through no fault of her own, is an academic at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire, has, in a paper much reported in the national press, suggested, to the surprise and consternation of many, that Jane Austen, who has for so long been regarded as the mistress of English prose, may have relied more than a little upon the corrections of William Gifford, a classical scholar in the employment of John Murray who was her publisher, a translator of Juvenal, and an imitator of Persius.
Christ, it's hard to write like Austen. Take the fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility:
But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.
Now let's cut away the subordinated stuff:
Her death....produced a great alteration...for...he invited... the family
The last seventeen words are apposite clauses relating to the possessor of the object of the second main clause. The extraordinary thing is that the prose is so readable, so lucid, despite being grammatically so distant from spoken English.
English doesn't like to be complicated. It's a bluff, crude language that likes to stride around in a series of main clauses. The spoken equivalent of that sentence would be something like:
She died ten years before he did. That changed things. He needed someone to replace her. So he invited Henry Dashwood's family to come and live with him. Dashwood was the legal inheritor...
In fact, spoken English isn't quite like that because the sentences of spoken English rarely end. But if you replace all the full stops with and then you'll end up with something approaching normal conversation.
As I say, it doesn't make sense in English, but it would in Latin. English likes to be simple because English has so few inflections. Unlike Latin (or German for that matter), you can't pin a suffix to the end of the word family to show how it relates to the main verb. This means that, in English, your grammar's complexity is your reader's confusion; unless you're very, very careful.
However, as Latin prose was thought the model of good writing, and Latin language the palace of good thinking, its grammar crept into our literature, if not our language. Milton read all the classics, and wrote poetry that Ezra Pound denied was English at all. Thomas Browne knocked out jormungandrian sentences that nonetheless delight. Over breakfast, De Quincey used to improvise translations of the newspapers into Greek. Dr Johnson wrote a Latinate English that nobody ever spoke, but which was, when Austen began writing, considered the peak, pinnacle and pineapple of prose perfection.
I always thought that that was where Miss Austen got her prose style. She imitated Dr Johnson and Dr Johnson imitated the Ancients and thus... well, thus that fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility. But now I have a new suspect: William Gifford, possessor of a classical education, and the man to whom Austen's prose was entrusted.
I have, though, not read Professor Sutherland's paper and can't find it online, so this must be taken as nothing more than the suspicions of a suspicious suspecter.
N.B. I'm working on the basis that Jane Austen herself didn't know Latin. This is reasonably safe, as she once wrote in a letter that she didn't know Latin. However, some scholars think that she only pretended not to know Latin in order to avoid getting a job.
A fainéant is an idler and a sluggard. Somehow you can guess that without bothering to dig out your dictionary. Fainéants sound lazy. Why? Why, dear inactive reader, did you suspect immediately that a fainéant was a lazybones, a lie-a-bed, and a lotos-eater?
Perhaps it was the suggestion of faint, with the éan slumbering redundantly in the middle. You pictured the poor fainéant so shocked by the threat of work that he had to go and lie down with some smelling salts and a good novel. Or perhaps you detected in fainéant a whisper, a suggestion, of fain. 'I would fain do that,' says the fainéant, 'but I have this terribly important pillow that I've promised to warm.'
Both suggestions rest dreamily upon the word like a warm linguistic duvet. Then you see an older spelling and the etymology seems to spring out at you.
Is there no difference [asked Samuel Ward in 1618] between busibodies and tell-clocks, between fac-totum and fay't neant?
'Aha!' you think, believing yourself to have unravelled the fainéant's sleepy secrets. 'A fainéant is a fait neant, a French do-nothing! It is like the Italian dolce far niente:it is sweet to do nothing.' And with that you are satisfied and relapse into a deeper slumber.
Yet still, dear reader, you are wrong: wrong because the French themselves were (as the French ever are) wrong. They thought that a fainéant was a fait neant because that's how it sounded to them. Yet the origin is hiding in a more ancient bedroom. A faignant, in Old French, was sluggard who feigned some excuse (French faindre) and feign relates to feint whose meaning meandered from lie to lazy to weak to faint, which means that, in a way, dear drowsy reader, you were right all along.
The original fainéants were the rois fainéants, the French kings of the late Merovingian dynasty who did nothing at all and earned themselves marvellous monikers like Louis the Sluggard.
The Dog Days start today. Well, it depends who you ask, really. But if you ask the Book of Common Prayer the Dog Days start today, and that's good enough for me.
Dog Days have nothing directly to do with dogs: they are named after the Dog Star, also called Sirius, which is the brightest star in all the heavens (excluding the sun). Back in Roman times the Dog Star rose with the sun during late summer and it was believed that it was this conjunction of the two brightest stars in the sky that caused the heat of July and August.
If you want to know what the next couple of months will be like, you need only consult Hesiod's Works and Days:
In the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled, thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.
Which is, verbatim, what I'm going to say the next time I see a waiter.
That Sirus heats the earth is not true scientifically, but it is true poetically; and poetry is Much More Important than truth. If you don't believe that principle, try using the two methods to get laid.
Shakespeare mentions the Dog Days in Henry VIII. He describes a red-nosed fellow by saying:
There is a fellow somewhat near the door, he should be a brazier by his face, for, o' my conscience, twenty of the dog-days now reign in's nose;
Milton appears to mention the heat of Sirius in Lycidas:
Ye valley low where the mild whispers use Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks
Pope complains that "The Dog Star rages". But my favourite reference to the Dog Days is, for some reason, Fons Bandusiae by Horace. It's only a passing reference and it's in Latin but it translates very roughly as:
Sabine spring, as clear as glass, Where the floating flowers pass, Take tomorrow’s sacrifice In your water cold as ice:
(For it grew its horns in vain, For it will not breathe again) Let the kid-goat’s hopeless blood Mingle with your perfect flood.
No: the Dog Days’ horrid heat Cannot touch you. Oxen’s feet Stray from ploughshare to your pool, Wander, rest there, and are cool.
Fame is yours, for I shall write – And eternity recite In perpetual murmuring tones – Of the oak upon your stones.
However, as I said, the Dog Days have nothing to do with dogs and nothing whatsoever to do with Hamlet's comment that:
Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
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Ultracrepidarianism is giving opinions on subjects that you know nothing about, and is thus a terribly useful word. Ultracrepidarian was introduced into English by the essayist William Hazlitt, but it goes back to an ancient story about the great Greek painter Apelles. 
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