Book 11
7
To use words that are too antiquated and worn out, or those which are unusual and of a harsh and unpleasant novelty, seems to be equally faulty. But for my own part I think it more offensive and censurable to use words that are new, unknown and unheard of, than those that are trite and mean. Furthermore, I maintain that those words also seem new which are out of use and obsolete, even though they are of ancient date. Cf. Hor. Ars. Poet. 46 ff. In fact, it is a common fault of lately acquired learning, or o)yimaqi/a as the Greeks call it, to make a great point anywhere and everywhere, and in connection with any subject whatever, to talk about what you have never learned and of which you were long ignorant, when at last you have begun to know something about it. For instance, at Rome in my presence a man of experience and celebrated as a pleader, who had acquired a sudden and, so to speak, haphazard kind of education, was speaking before the prefect of the city and wished to say that a certain man lived upon poor and wretched food, ate bread made from bran, and drank flat and spoiled wine: This Roman knight, said he, eats apluda and drinks flocces. All who were present looked at one another, at first somewhat seriously, with a disturbed and inquiring aspect, wondering what in the world the two words meant; then presently they all burst into a laugh, as if he had said something in Etruscan or Gallic. Now that man had read that the farmers of ancient days called the chaff of grain apluda, and that the word was used by Plautus in the comedy entitled Astraba, 14, Götz; 16, Linds. if that play be the work of Plautus. He had also heard that flocces in the early language meant the lees of wine pressed from the skins of grapes, corresponding to the dregs of oil from olives. This he had read in the Polumeni The Pwlou/menoi, or Men offered for sale. of Caecilius, 190, Ribbeck3. and he had saved up those two words as ornaments for his speeches.
