The Make-up of the English Vocabulary

essential to the judgment he was making, and therefore not binding or

authoritative. Hence the words ‘obiter dictum ’ or the plural ‘obiter dicta’ are used of some person’s incidental remark or remarks. The words ‘rigor

mortis’ (‘rigidity of death’) are in common use for the state of a corpse

after stiffness has set in.

Longer Latin Expressions

There are longer expressions, some of them quotations from great writers,

which have been so much used that it may be necessary only to quote

the first words of the saying for the rest to be understood. The words

‘quot homines’ will be understood to stand for ‘quot homines, tot

sententiae’, literally ‘how many men there are, so many opinions there are’. The English language does not have matching resources to make such

complex comparisons so briefly. The words ‘sic transit gloria m undi’,

meaning ‘thus the glory o f the world passes away’, will be understood if

the speaker merely says ‘sic transit’. Similarly the words ‘de mortuis nil

nisi bonum ’, meaning ‘only good things should be said of the dead’,

will be understood if only the words ‘de m ortuis’ are said. The Latin poet

Horace’s famous line ‘Duke et decorum est pro patria m ori’, meaning

‘How beautiful and honourable it is to die for one’s country’, comes into

the same category. Wilfred Owen called one of his war poems ‘Duke et

Decorum est’, and in fact it is perhaps his most horrifying picture of men

at the front. It includes a grim account of a soldier choking from a gas

attack, whom his fellows fling on to a wagon, watching his ‘white eyes

w rithing’ in his hanging face. It was from Horace too that we gained the expression ‘laudator temporis acti’ ( ‘praiser of days gone by’), used to

describe someone who repeatedly compares the present unfavourably

with an idealized past. Juvenal’s line ‘Orandus est ut sit mens sana in

corpore sano’, meaning ‘One should pray to have a sound mind in a

sound body’ has left us an expression ‘mens sana in corpore sano’, a

healthy mind in a healthy body, which has been cited as an educational ideal.

In many o f the instances listed above the foreign expression has

advantages of clarity and brevity as well as a peculiar neatness and

forcefulness. If we take these advantages into account, we should certainly

not think of condemning the introduction of foreign phrases into English

prose. But over-use of such expressions, or use o f them in inappropriate