Since I’m studying Latin a lot these days, it’s become a pet peeve of mine that knowledge of the language come free with a certain level of intelligence. I don’t mean knowing a few Latin phrases, I mean being able to translate a previously unknown bit of text as easily as they’d read it in English without having to look anything up. Worse still is when they want to throw in some Latin, but don’t want to bother calling at least a 2nd semester student of the subject.
On the 6th season finale of CSI: New York, they used Latin as a prop, but it was gibberish. Amazingly, though, Mac Taylor turned out to be fluent in gibberish.
First, Taylor discovers that a dollar bill has been tampered with, and what was supposed to say “E PLURIBUS UNUM” instead said “E UNUM PLURIBUS”. So she says, “Out of one, many!”
No. Wrong. Latin does not work that way!
But, at least that much could have seemed too obvious to bother checking on, so I was charitable.
Then they found a bill doctored to say “LAQUEM NEMUS” and Taylor without pause says “Laque-um means ‘noose’ and nee-mus means ‘tree’”. I myself had to look these up, because my own studies haven’t involved these words lately. But, okay, Mac Taylor just has these off the top of his head. So then he immediately says, “Laqueum is misspelled. And why is it in the accusative in appostion to nemus, which doesn’t mean ‘tree’ it means ‘grove’” Right? Nope. Apparently this nonsense is completely transparent to him.
Still later they found another bill that says “MEUS FIDES ERUM PALLIUM”. Um, my faith did something to the cloaked boss? Except that ‘fides’ is feminine, and ‘meus’ is masculine. Mac Taylor understands, though: “My faith was stolen.” He cleverly figured out that ‘erum’ is actually supposed to be ‘eram’, but how did he work out that ‘pallium’ meant ‘stolen’ when it isn’t even a verb? Or a participle of any verb hat I can find? It means ‘cloak’.
Well, of course, when I investigated I found that the first automatic Latin translator that comes up on Google gives these exact same gibberish, except for misspellings which clearly came from whoever passed the info to the art department having written it down from hearing.
Those prop dollar bills probably cost more to make than it would have cost to consult a high school Latin teacher to bang out a couple of accurate translations in a few minutes. Hell, they’d probably do it over the phone just so their own students didn’t see Latin done even more badly on TV than usual, though you could at least spring for lunch. But, no, millions spent producing a show, and they have priorities. There’s money for fancy props, but none for making sure what’s written on them isn’t bollocks.
