# Biggus Dickus
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [October 16, 2008, 10:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175 "2008-10-16T10:17:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/21 "2008-10-16T16:48:30Z")
> [@](#):
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> Biggus Dickus is most certainly a fake name.
>
> Incontinentia Buttocks, however, is absolutely genuine.
But what about Naughtius Maximus?
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### Author:  [@teela\_brown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/teela_brown)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/22 "2008-10-16T17:07:50Z")
The French comic _Asterix_ is, of course, replete with punning Roman names. My favorite one is _Gluteus Maximus_, which is the name of a muscular but stupid Roman athlete in _Asterix at the Olympic Games_.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/23 "2008-10-16T17:49:04Z")
> [@](#):
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> The French comic Asterix is, of course, replete with punning Roman names. My favorite one is Gluteus Maximus, which is the name of a muscular but stupid Roman athlete in Asterix at the Olympic Games.
A bit obvious, really. I prefer _Nefarius Purpus_.
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### Author:  [@Kizarvexius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kizarvexius)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/24 "2008-10-16T19:07:54Z")
Some Roman names certainly sound comical to our ears – Caligula’s praetorian prefect was named Macro, for example. There was a notable senator named Gaius Julius Vindex (pronounced “windex” in classical Latin). Or the famous general Marcius Turbo. My personal favorite from my undergraduate days was a politician named Lucius Genucius. Of course not to be forgotten is Catallus’ series of poems to his notorious maneater of a lover, whom he called by the pseudonym Lesbia.
Other names were intentionally snarky from the beginning, being in many cases bestowed upon a person due to some prominent physical trait and often passed on down the family line. Aside from Cicero, who (as previously mentioned) possessed an ancestor who bore an prominent wart on his face, the most famous example is Sesquiculus. Literally, “an asshole and a half,” no one is certain whence came this charming moniker, though one theory is that the unlucky fellow bore a navel-like scar on his forehead, perhaps from a war wound.
Ancient comedies are rife with punny names, such as the father and son characters in Aristophanes’ _The Clouds_. Strepsiades, the father, is so called because of his chronic insomnia – “strep” comes from the Greek root meaning twisting (as in tossing and turning). The source of his problem is that his teenage son is living beyond their means, spending all of his time (and money) racing horses. The son’s name, Pheidippides, translates more or less to “thrifty horseman”, which in the context of the times was an oxymoron. Horsemen, to keep their reputations, had to invest constantly on their mounts, gear, etc., meaning that only the well off – with money to burn – could afford to indulge in this hobby. So seen in this light, the son’s name means something along the lines of “extravagant penny-pincher”.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/25 "2008-10-16T19:15:46Z")
> [@](#):
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> And Cicero means ‘pea’, which is a nickname that stuck with some ancestor of the Cicero we know as a result of the warts in that ancestor’s face.
Really? I had always heard that it was just because one of his ancestors farmed chickpeas.
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### Author:  [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/26 "2008-10-16T19:32:40Z")
> [@teela\_brown](#):
>
> The French comic _Asterix_ is, of course, replete with punning Roman names. My favorite one is _Gluteus Maximus_, which is the name of a muscular but stupid Roman athlete in _Asterix at the Olympic Games_.
And there were Cacofonix’s two guards at the circus: Sendervictorius and Appianglorius\*… 🙂
The names are often very different in English than in French, BTW; the puns fallow the language of reading, not the original. For instance, the druid Getafix was Panoramix in the original French. And in Esperanto, Miraklomix. (I have some of the comics in all three languages.) [Wikipedia link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getafix#Getafix).
[sub]\*references to the lyrics of _God Save the Queen_[/sub]
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### Author:  [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/27 "2008-10-16T20:55:08Z")
Also in Asterix, I liked the Egyptian guy whose name was Ptenisnet. Being Egyptian, of course, he spoke in hieroglyphics, so his name in his own speech-balloon was a sketch of a tennis net. 🙂
Extensive research, however, has failed to establish whether Pilate did in fact have an embawwasing speech impediment.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/28 "2008-10-16T21:13:58Z")
> [@](#):
>
> The names are often very different in English than in French, BTW; the puns fallow the language of reading, not the original. For instance, the druid Getafix was Panoramix in the original French.
I know, and it pisses me off. “Panoramix” I like, and when I read Asterix aloud to MilliCal, I always change the druid’s name to Panoramix. “Getafix” makes him sound like a drug pusher (and if you think magical strength potion is the equivalent of smack or crack, we’ll have words.)
Changing “Ideefix” to “Dogmatix” I can live with – the joke doesn’t work in French.
One thing that’s puzzled me is that they frequently change other jokes from the French version. The british editions sometimes puzzled me, because the point of the joke was lost on an American like me. It was often years before I stumbled across the real meaning. Doubtless there are still some jokes I haven’t got. What we really need is an American edition of Asterix.
But the thing that puzzled me was in “Asterix in Britain”. At one point Asterix and Obelix go down into the basement where the Roman soldiers have been industriously tasting all the barrels of wine, in search of the one filled with potion. Of course, they haven’t found it, and they’re all drunk. Coming up from them you see a succession of “hic”, “hic”, “hic”.\*
Now, you don’t have to take more than a month of Latin, tops, before you see the obvious joke. The Guards start hiccuping “hic” “haec” “hoc”. At least they do in the English-language edition.
In the French, the joke isn’t there at all. They just continue hiccupping "hic’ "hic’ “hic”. Howcum?
- For those of you who didn’t take Latin:
[http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/latin/qt/latindempronoun.htm](http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/latin/qt/latindempronoun.htm)
[http://www.personal.kent.edu/~bkharvey/latin/morph/morprohc.htm](http://www.personal.kent.edu/~bkharvey/latin/morph/morprohc.htm)
> **[DemonstrativePronouns.pdf](https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/101/DemonstrativePronouns.pdf)**
>
> 5.67 KB
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### Author:  [@Kizarvexius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kizarvexius)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/29 "2008-10-16T21:36:21Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#):
>
> But the thing that puzzled me was in “Asterix in Britain”. At one point Asterix and Obelix go down into the basement where the Roman soldiers have been industriously tasting all the barrels of wine, in search of the one filled with potion. Of course, they haven’t found it, and they’re all drunk. Coming up from them you see a succession of “hic”, “hic”, “hic”.\*
>
> Now, you don’t have to take more than a month of Latin, tops, before you see the obvious joke. The Guards start hiccuping “hic” “haec” “hoc”. At least they do in the English-language edition.
>
> In the French, the joke isn’t there at all. They just continue hiccupping "hic’ "hic’ “hic”. Howcum?
According to _The Complete Guide to Asterix_ (which I have at home somewhere) the translators saw an opportunity to throw in a joke, and they seized it.
Incidentally (warning: pedantic rambling follows) _Hic haec hoc_ is not – or at least didn’t used to be – something only Latin students would know, but was actually used as a descriptive term for a Latin education itself. Sort of akin to learning one’s ABCs, or “readin’, ritin’, rithmatic.” I know I’ve seen it used that way somewhere in the Aubrey/Maturin series…Jack states at some point that he’d done the whole _hic haec hoc_ as a boy but that it never stuck.
Aaaaaanyway, I have the Latin language edition of _Asterix and the Goths_, and what I find hilarious is that the names given to the German chiefs all make perfect sense in English…Rhetoric, Bombastic, Electric, Mobidic, and Tricidic.
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### Author:  [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2008, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggus-dickus/468175/30 "2008-10-16T23:37:53Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> Really? I had always heard that it was just because one of his ancestors farmed chickpeas.
I think the origin is apocryphal, and both of those stories are common. Plutarch said it was because of an ancestor with a “chickpea” on his nose, but it’s also been speculated that that was just a colorful story and that he just came from a family of chickpea farmers.
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