All Greek: St John’s T-Shirt Dismays Expert
Some light thinking for your Thursday afternoon (and I hate to start with a cliché, but…): It’s all Greek to me, but apparently there’s this T-shirt that St. John’s College released sometime last year, and in ancient Greek it reads, “If you can read this, you’re overeducated”—its humor, needless to say, lost on the merely educated.
The incorrectly accented words, circled by Palaima.
So here’s what happens: A Santa Fean buys one of the shirts and sends it as a thank-you gift to Tom Palaima, the Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas in Austin. And Palaima, gleefully tearing open the box with two of his Classics colleagues looking on, finds this St John’s shirt on which the ancient Greek is totally, um, wrong. Palaima, naturally, can read ancient Greek—he even knows which dialect it is (Attic)—and he knows that the accents and breathing marks on the shirt’s Greek are erroneous. Which adds a whole new level of irony to the thing: You may have to be overeducated to read the shirt, but you basically have to be a professor to know that it’s mis-accented ancient Greek! Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if such levels of ironic erudition were quite the college’s intent. (A spokeswoman for St John’s in Santa Fe confirmed that the T-shirts have been taken off the market and that they will be corrected before being reprinted.)
When I called Palaima to discuss the error, he lamented what he described as a lack of oversight.
“I just found it surprising, with the quality of the faculty, that they wouldn’t even bother to check,” Palaima says. “There clearly are Greek scholars on their faculty that they can run this by.”
To Palaima, the bad-Greek debacle indicates a deeper erosion of knowledge—the sort of societal malaise that has us lionizing the likes of Sarah Palin and condemning Harvard graduates.
“[The word] ‘elite’ has become pejorative, but in origin it just means that you’re kind of special,” Palaima says. “That’s what they’re trying to promote here, and it’s false. There are eight words here, and two are misspelled. What does that say?”
Palaima, who is something like the epitome of elite—MacArthur Fellow, public intellectual—fed my undernourished (I blame Twitter) appetite for scholarly discourse. He’s the type of guy who peppers his conversation with quotes from Plato, Socrates and Willie Nelson and opines on college football even as he laments America’s loss of academic integrity.
“It’s depressing to see this in such an institution as St John’s,” Palaima says. “To capitalize on the fact that the St John’s education goes back to the classics and then to so cavalierly disregard what you’re putting on a T-shirt…” He sighs. “Would you issue an airplane off the assembly line when you knew the landing gear was malfunctional?”
Obviously not. One could argue that the ancient-Greek-on-a-T-shirt stakes are slightly lower, but even so, Palaima’s right about the erosion of intellectualism. We’re not a nation of fools, but the onus is upon us to keep those in positions of relative power—elite or not—from treating us as one.
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January 14th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
FTW
January 15th, 2010 at 8:51 am
The most salient point by Mr. Palaima is re: the lack of managerial oversight by St. John staff.
Camus is quotes as sying “The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”
Possibly, the real winner in this little drama is the gentle-person who chose to send the T-shirt to Mr. Palaima …
Bill Gregoricus
St. John’s G.I.
Class of 2000
January 15th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Lack of oversight is certainly to blame in this case. It’s worth noting, though, that the accents and breathing marks are what’s wrong here, and that many computer programs frequently fail to print them properly. It’s quite possible that the person who typed this up did it correctly and that the computer is responsible for the error. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the oversight. Anyone who has studied Greek for even a few semesters would recognize those errors. Beginning students notoriously pay no attention to accents, and poor teachers fail to compel them to do so. I can guarantee you, however, that St. John’s is not short on people who could spot those mistakes as easily as they would spot spelling errors in English.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
The computer MAY have been responsible for somehow erasing the circumflex over the iota and the acute over the second omicron in *hoios* and the smooth breathing under the circumflex over the iota in *ei*, but it seems unlikely that it will have moved the rough breathing from the first omicron to the iota in *hoios*.
January 16th, 2010 at 12:24 am
Thanks to Alexa for a well-written story and the three people who wrote comments so far for adding to it.
As I told her, two of the dearest people to me in my career as a classicist, Ellen Davis, professor emerita of Queen’s College in NYC, and Mary Blomberg, retired from University of Uppsala in Sweden, were St. John’s graduates. And I know others as friends. So this bothered me more than it might otherwise, especially with no-nothingness being promoted as a virtue in our culture and causing so much harm.
Indeed, it is the accents and breathings that are amiss; and early Greek was written all capitals and without accents or even spaces separating words, so one can get the sense of this even with the accents and breathings wrong, in part.
What I explained to Alexa and what A Reader probably knows is that the accents and breathings were hard-won inventions of Hellenistic grammarians who were striving to preserve the sound of Greek for contemporaries and for the future. And they succeeded through their painstaking efforts. Now we are more and more willing to ignore what they did for us. We are abandoning the teaching of foreign languages in general (one of the first subject areas to be cut back at UT Austin in the face of the current budget crisis, even as we raised the football coach’s salary by $2 million–that is just the raise increment–was foreign language instruction).
The St. John’s t-shirt is just one example among a dozen or so that I have collected, without even looking. Prestigious publishers like New Directions Press have done far worse things in printing ancient Greek in books they have published.
If you go to
http://www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/publications/articles/articlesa.html
and scroll down to articles by Tom Palaima, 6th from the bottom of that list you will find an article with the title: “The Browning Versions and Classical Greek.” You can click and download the pdf. You will in it read what infinite pains Terence Rattigan took in the early 50’s with the film version of his masterful play to use bits of Greek to real purpose in laying out a simple story of the tragic emotional lives of two human beings. In one case, some Greek on a blackboard used as a background prop is significant. It was chosen and used for its dramatic effect, despite the fact that few viewers could possibly read it.
Carlyle in his *History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great*, IV, iii, wrote of the great labor Frederick expended in the first ten years of his reign and defined his genius in part as a “transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all.” That is what is missing here and in so much of American life now. This simple St. John’s t-shirt is symptomatic.
The image of being something, in this case educated within the admirable renaissance tradition of St. John’s, is sufficient. It is something you can buy, both as a degree and a t-shirt. If you buy and wear this shirt you cannot even read, you should at least be able to have confidence that the institution that is using it as part of what is now called its ‘brand’, has taken not ‘transcendent’ or ‘infinite’ pains, but just run a simple check.
Greek is hard. It is easy to make mistakes. Even 38 years after I started Greek, I still make mistakes. But I know my grasp of Greek is not perfect and I check. And all the great scholars and talents I know and the people who strive to do things well in any pursuit take care to get things right.
There are surely more important problems in our world. But Willy Nelson says he learned the principle ‘police your own area’ in the air force. And that is what I tried to do here.
See: http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2665.
January 16th, 2010 at 5:16 am
“the ancient Greek is totally, um, wrong. Palaima, naturally, can read ancient Greek—he even knows which dialect it is (Attic)—and he knows that the accents and breathing marks …”
That’s the joke.
“If you can read this, you’re overeducated(sic)”
Palaima obviously is. First semester Freshmen at St. John’s are, too.
What is knowledge?
SJC ‘81 Smith
January 18th, 2010 at 7:41 am
I agree that the accents cannot be due to word processing problems. On a side note, they don’t understand how much they lose in sales. Bake sale t-shirts are commonplace at my College as well, but I refuse to buy ‘the level of hell Danté forgot’. if only they finally removed that ´..
In the meantime I’ll settle for ‘That’s all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?’
January 18th, 2010 at 8:28 am
To: bcks
One kind of knowledge is knowing that or what you don’t know and proceeding with caution in matters that depend on your thinking and intellectual instincts.
A few more points here.
Sometimes we have what are called sober second thoughts or, by the French, inspirations on the staircase, i.e., things we should have said in dinner or party conversation that come into our heads only after we have left the apartment where the gathering we were at was held.
How would the St. John’s community feel if people were wearing a t-shirt with its diacritical conventions wrong in a comparable way in English?
sT’ joHns. College
Greek is hard and requires attention. So do lots of other things.
Often in our summer intensive Greek at UT Austin, which I have taught in 12 of the last 13 years, the students do up t-shirts. One summer a few students came to me outside of class when I was very busy and asked that I give them the Mycenaean Greek and Linear B equivalents of a famous line in Homer which leading linguists have argued goes back to a pre-Mycenaean, ca. 15th c. BCE origin. I dashed it all off and got one syllable wrong. Thus it was printed. Because I was careless.
Remember the Aryan heresy turned on whether Christ was of the same substance as God the Father or of similar substance. The difference of an iota:
homos vs. homoios.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am
These are diacritical marks, not accents. Live by the snark, die by the snark.
Michael A. Olivas
Santa Fe, NM
January 18th, 2010 at 10:21 am
It’s “Willie” Nelson, not “Willy.” Think of it as Texan diacritical marks.
That said, some home-schooler in the Ladies’ Sewing Circle who whipped up the Gonzales Flag knew what “Molon Labe” translated to. So I’ve got your Sarah Palin right here, Perfesser.
January 18th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[...] you can read this, you’re overeducated” T-shirt—written in Attic Greek—was under-proofread. Better a T-shirt than a tattoo, eh, [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
In the interests of full disclosure, two kind local friends pointed out to me not only the Willy vs. Willie mistake (I wrote him that I had taken his name in vain, or maybe I should have written ‘in vein’), but also that I wrote
‘no-nothingness’ rather than ‘know-nothingness’.
Put that on my t-shirt and smoke it.
Tom Palaima
January 18th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
It’s the “Arian” heresy, named after Arius. (Noted with humility, as one who has made my share of mistakes in Greek and English.)
January 18th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Speaking of disregard in matters of language, it is worth noting perhaps also Palaima’s wicked split infinitive: “To capitalize on the fact that the St John’s education goes back to the classics and then TO so cavalierly DISREGARD what you’re putting on a T-shirt”.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Do not trust the T-shirt, Dr Palaima! Whatever it says, I fear the Greek-spouting Santa Feans, even sending presents.
January 19th, 2010 at 5:56 am
Howdy.
Now, I love a good perispomenon as much as the next Greek professor, I teach accents (excuse me, diacritical marks) to my students, and the _ei_ is a bit painful. But I wonder…if a student does not have the ability to produce the accents, what exactly are they missing? What music can they not hear? Perhaps this question arises out of a sneaking feeling of inadequacy, perhaps out of a sneaking suspicion as to the artificiality of the diacritical marks. Still, it’s a serious question for me, as I work with students whose grasp of even colloquial English is often all too tenuous. The temptations of triage are perilously strong, and I continually ponder the reasons for which I teach accent, when they could profitably use that time reviewing athematic aorists…
The worry raised for me by the article is, then, less about the loss of a specific area of knowledge than about a societal decline in the respect for exactitude. Which is to say, as Palaima also intimates in his comments, I’m less bothered by the t-shirt makers’ mistakes in accentuation than by the lack of respect for their product; it takes, what, five minutes to check that sentence against the accent information in the LSJ? When did “good enough” replace “good” as the end of human activity?
January 19th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
This story is certainly amusing. But, why was it not possible for the author to write it without including political comments? There is certainly too much ignorance in the world, and all of us have more to learn. Ignorance, however, is hardly confined to those that agree with Sarah Palin’s politics, and enlightenment is certainly not reserved to those who have graduated from elite schools such as Harvard. Would you believe that you can graduate from Harvard School of Law and even be President of the Harvard Law Review, without learning basic and fundamental lessons of recent history, such as the fact that appeasement only encourges those intent on evil?
January 19th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
This was not a mistake on the part of the faculty, as I gave the staff responsible a correct hand-written version. Somebody must have entered it incorrectly into the computer (and it was not later run by me). True, there are errors, but whose business is it to place blame when they are ignorant of the situation? People are busy and sometimes make mistakes. Ironically, if you can read it even with the errors, doesn’t that mean you are even more educated? To take these mistakes as signs of some larger “problem” is simply asinine, and to be utterly punctilious about what is in effect a form of punctuation is puerile (will you say that ancient Greek inscriptions are ‘incorrect’ because they lack accents and breathing marks?).
Ken Wolfe
Tutor, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:25 pm
but you basically have to be a professor to know that it’s mis-accented ancient Greek!
No you don’t.
Plus it doesn’t make sense even if it were accented right.
January 23rd, 2010 at 4:35 pm
How embarrassing for the college. St. John’s has finally seen its weasel on the crest of the waves, and now the theatre is laughing.
I lament the fact that accents are generally ignored by those who learn Greek. Most students (and professors) do not care about them because the general aim of those who study Greek is to read the Classics in the original, and it is still possible to arrive at a passable translation without a perfect knowledge of the accentuation, as many have demonstrated in the tutorials.
However, the accents are important because they are a record of the pronunciation. Language is primarily sound, and if you ignore the sounds, you are cut off from the musicality of the language, from a considerable part of its aesthetics, and from any potential analysis in verse between sound, rhythm, and meaning. Palaima is right, and St. John’s should approach this differently in its language tutorials. If something is worth learning (as indeed Greek is) it is worth learning well.
It was often repeated at St. John’s that we study Greek not to learn Greek but to learn more about language in general. Let it be acknowledged once and for all that this end is better met when Greek is learned for its own sake.
The best thing for the college to do is graciously to acknowledge the mistake, apologise with a good sense of humour about ourselves, and then improve the Greek tutorials on this point.
J. Sebastián Pagani
SJC Santa Fe, 1995
January 23rd, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Dear Mr. Wolfe:
No one will claim the inscriptions are incorrect because they lack the accentuation marks (though not all inscriptions are missing the breathing marks). If there is one thing that should be pointed out (not to Palaima, for he knows this already, but nevertheless pointed out for the sake of the discussion) it is that the ancients had no need of accentuation marks because they already knew how to pronounce the words. The fact that Palaima (and others who have learned their Greek well) know how to correct the oversights on the T-shirt means that they too have learned how the Greek is pronounced. They learned this however, because they cared to learn the rules of Greek accentuation that were developed in the Hellenistic Age just so that posterity would not forget the traditional pronunciation of the language (Aristophanēi gratiās).
The accents ‘are’ dispensible, but only to native speakers of ancient Greek.
January 31st, 2010 at 2:14 am
Punctilious, puerile, asinine.
I stand convicted of pointing out mistakes on a t-shirt that no one cared enough about to proofread at whatever stage in the production process.
And it is symptomatic of our times.
In the grand scheme of things, it is trivial, as is everything written here by me.
But I thank all of you for providing your perspectives on this.
Ignorance is everywhere, but so are some very smart and honest people.