Kitap 8
3.26
What need have we of acrumnosum? Wretched. It is surely enough to call a thing horridum. Reor may be tolerated, autumo Assert. smacks of tragedy, proles Offspring. has become a rarity, while prosapia Stock, family. stamps the man who uses it as lacking taste. Need I say more Almost the whole language has changed.
3.27
But there are still some old words that are endeared to us by their antique sheen, while there are others that we cannot avoid using occasionally, such, for example, as nuncupare and fari: Name, speak. there are yet others which it requires some daring to use, but which may still be employed so long as we avoid all appearance of that affectation which Virgil Catal. ii. has derided so cleverly: Britain's Thucydides, whose mad Attic brain Loved word-amalgams like Corinthian bronze, First made a horrid blend of words from Gaul, Tau, al, min, sil and God knows how much else, Then mixed them in a potion for his brother! This was a certain Cimber who killed his brother,
3.29
a fact which Cicero recorded in the words, Cimber has killed his brother German. Phil. XI. vi. 14. A pun on the two meanings of gemanus, brother and German. The epigram against Sallust is scarcely less well known: Crispus, you, too, Jugurtha's fall who told, And filched such store of words from Cato old.
