How would you best render “I am a salad dressing dude” into Latin ?
English is often ambiguous, especially when nouns are used attributively. Do you mean that you are dude who likes salad dressing? who makes or sells salad dressing? who looks like salad dressing?
“i am the dude who makes the salad dressing” also ok, but second choice:
“I am the dude who is the salad dressing”
Context: In Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure, they explain that Caesar is " a salad dressing dude" Had Caesar concurred, how would he have expressed that?
Wouldn’t that be that Caesar is a dude who had a salad dressing named after him? But Bill and Ted were pretty fuzzy thinkers, so who knows what they meant.
The next question is what salad dressing is in Latin. They had the right ingredients, including olive oil, vinegar, lemons, and various spices, but the best word I’m finding is “condimentum”, which includes sauces and spices. So Caesar might respond, “Illum condimentum amo”, or “I like that dressing.”
Would
“Ego svm vir qvisnam creo moretvm vestio”
translate as:
“I am man who makes salad clothing” ?
Would “Svm vir creo moretvm vestio” be better?
Homo acetaria condimentum sum.
(“I am the salad sauce man.”)
I think that’s about as close as we’re going to get.
ETA or maybe you could try the Homo acetariae condimenti sum. (“I am the man of the salad sauce.”)
Quis acetariam fecit?
Cæsar acetariam fecit!
I’ll take a crack at the OP-- how about… Acetariafex sum?
But he makes the dressing, not the salad.
I appreciate the answers, but I’m not quite there yet.
I want it to read “I am the man who makes the clothing for the salad” (my quirk, go with me here), and I think I want to use “vir” because of the leader or hero feel of the word.
Should I go with “Svm vir creo acetarivm vestio”? Do I have my syntax/word endings wrong?
Not only is the syntax and morphology wrong, you don’t need those 'v’s either. Try this:
Vir qui vestem acetaria facet sum. (“I am the man who makes clothes for the salad.”)
ETA CJJ’s answer works too but ius indicates more of a broth or a soup than a sauce.
Vir sum qui ius acetario praeparo.; if you really want “clothing”, change ius to vestem.
Perhaps dative acetario is better here. Also unlike English, Latin usually keeps the person of the verb the same in the relative clause, so I’d recommend facio.
Thanks, all!
I thought it was the ablative but maybe youre right. I was always terrible at parsing out case forms for relative clauses.
I had to think about that last part and went back and forth on it. The first person ultimately just seemed wrong to me but you’re probably right.
I have nothing to contribute. I just wanted to say that threads like this are why I love this board!
One place to look for vocabulary is in a source like Apicius.*
The Romans actually liked to load up their versions of salad (salata) as we would think of them with salt – the English word for salad derives from the Latin word for salt, in fact, and salata more or less means ‘having been salted.’
So I would suppose since the dressing lends itself to the name of the dish, you might render your sentence as ‘Ecce magister salata’: ‘Behold the salad master.’ or ‘Behold the saladmeister’ if you’re feeling a bit silly.
*One version of a salad recipe I recall from Apicius is quite different from the modern bowl of shredded leafy veg and things. Instead they tended to pile up the greenery in layers on bread – so you’d find a recipe for buttered bread, soaked (or sprinkled with) oil-and-vinegar, then a layer of leafy greens, for example.
edit to remove an errant comma