The sex secrets of Kennedy's Latin Primer

A friend (and distinguished contributor to the TLS) e-mailed me at the week-end on the subject of Kennedy’s Latin Primer. He had come across an old article in the Guardian by the no less distinguished Valentine Cunningham, suggesting that the “Memorial Lines on the Gender of Latin Substantives”, which form an appendix to the Primer, were a “camp semaphore” – in other words, a cover for a series of steamy references to pederasty. It was an argument about Kennedy I had missed.

For those who do not number Kennedy (seen here with "the gerund") among their bed-time books, these “Memorial Lines” are a series of  jingles to help the young learner remember which Latin nouns are masculine, which feminine and which neuter. (“To nouns that cannot be declined/ The neuter gender is assigned. .” as one of the more memorable examples goes.) To judge from my father’s memory up to his death bed, they were once drilled into the heads of the young. Already in my day, they seemed a bit quaint.

Cunningham was really interested in the re-use of the jingles by Benjamin Britten in his version of the “Turn of the Screw” (no problem with the camp there). What caught my attention was his claim that, by a very careful choice of examples, old Kennedy himself – whose Revised Primer came out in 1888 and is still going strong (even if we don’t do the jingles much any longer) --  encoded a very similar  message.

My first instinct was to scoff. But after a bit of work, I wasn’t so sure.

The particular example Cunningham, and Britten, were interested in was this (you’ll have to say it out loud to get the flavour):

“Many Nouns in is we find
to the Masculine assigned:
amnis, axis, caulis, collis,
clunis, crinis, fascis, follis,
fustis, ignis, orbis, ensis,
panis, piscis, postis, mensis,
torris, unguis and canalis,
vectis, vermis and natalis,
sanguis, pulvis, cucumis,
lapis, casses, Manes, glis.

Kennedy translates all the Latin words he uses here in a sober fashion: “river, axle, stalk, hill, hind-leg, hair . . .”. Cunningham points out that a surprising number of them had other meanings. Clunis (“hind-leg” for Kennedy) is anus; caulis (”cabbage-stalk”) can also mean “prick”; follis (“bellows”) is slang for scrotum. And so on.

For Cunningham, this was “school-master funnies” for “other Latin masters in the linguistic know”. I checked all this out with the vade mecum of Latin smut, J. N. Adams’s Latin Sexual Vocabulary (which is what I imagine Cunningham had done) and found myself agreeing that an awful lot of this Latin did have a decidedly sexual second meaning.

A bit more work brought to light an article replying to Cunningham --  by Christopher Stray, who knows more about Benjamin Hall Kennedy (Head of Shrewsbury School and Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge) than any man alive. Stray poured cold water on the whole idea. For a start Kennedy was born more than a century before Adams investigated Latin sexual slang – and the dictionary he would have used (Lewis and Short – also still going strong) doesn’t register many of these double entendres. Besides Kennedy was a productively married man, with a son and four daughters (two of whom, Marion and Julia, effectively wrote the Primer that goes under their father’s name – as Stray himself has shown). If he translated raunchy terms into bland euphemism (“hind leg” for “anus”), that was just Victorian prudishness.

Fair enough, and I am loath to take a different line from Stray. But I still have a feeling that there is here no smoke without fire. Kennedy’s Lewis and Short Dictionary may have turned its back on quite a lot of smut, but it still recognises “caulis” as “membrum virile” (and, in any case, I bet that the acute Latinists of the late nineteenth century knew more than what was in their dictionaries). And the fact that Kennedy was married with kids is no proof at all that he wasn’t well into the pederastic culture of the period.

Besides the more you look at it, the queerer it gets. It doesn’t take much to see another word lying behind Kennedy’s “panis”. And – taking a look through the other “memorial lines” – it is strange, to say the least, that all the dodgy words seem to cluster in this particular verse on “the masculine”.

But don’t let on, else they’ll try to ban it.

Comments

[Paul Leopold]

Apropos bawdry and Latin grammar, do you know the epigram, attributed to Janus Secundus (1511-1536), which is repeated by Casanova in Memoirs, Vol I, Ch 2?

Dicite, grammatici, cur mascula nomina cunnus,
Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet.

(Say, O grammarians why c**t is a masculine noun and p**ck feminine.)

Casanova claims it was posed to him as an 11-year-old boy by a quizzical Englishman, to whom he wittily replied:

Disce quod a dominis nomina servus habet.

(Learn that the slave takes the name of the master)

The context also contains an interesting note on how the English pronounced Latin at the time. In translation it reads:

At the supper-table, the doctor, seated next to my mother, was very awkward. He would very likely not have said one word, had not an Englishman, a writer of talent, addressed him in Latin; but the doctor, being unable to make him out, modestly answered that he did not understand English, which caused much hilarity. M. Baffo, however, explained the puzzle by telling us that Englishmen read and pronounced Latin in the same way that they read and spoke their own language, and I remarked that Englishmen were wrong as much as we would be, if we pretended to read and to pronounce their language according to Latin rules. The Englishman, pleased with my reasoning, wrote down the following old couplet, and gave it to me to read:

'Dicite, grammatici, cur mascula nomina cunnus,
Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet.'

After reading it aloud, I exclaimed, "This is Latin indeed."
"We know that," said my mother, "but can you explain it,"
"To explain it is not enough," I answered; "it is a question which is worthy of an answer." And after considering for a moment, I wrote the following pentameter:

'Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet.'

This was my first literary exploit, and I may say that in that very instant the seed of my love for literary fame was sown in my breast.

[M. Hoeber, B.A., M.A.]

Alas, the only jingle I ever retained was not from my Latin studies, but from biology, and had to do with the Mendelian theory of genetics.

The opening line is:
"There was a young lady named Sharkey..."

The rest of the poem has to do with the lady's sexual congress with a gentleman of color, resulting in two sets of twins: "One white, one black, and two khaki."

[anon again]

To append Beard's secret sex habits, here is another one, along the same lines. It reads:- "Oh my God. There is a REAL Spartan army in my head at work." and a colleague went "What are you talking about? You are crazy." and I went "Christ. Ephebes and amazons." and they went "Cohorts" (thinking that they were being funny and that everything was indeed a bit bizarre, but that they should go Roman) and I shook myself and mustered courageously "Positively and DEFINITELY NOT cohorts. Oh my God." Do Spartan armies still exist now? Where can we find them? Shall we try to look?

[dr venables preller]

We probably don’t need to be too tense about upper echelons.

In the context of my post the term was intended to be indicative of a professional grade of colonial civil servant of Oxbridge education, who in this case following a typical pattern of colonial retirement earlier than usual in the home country on account of assumed exposure to the sun and risk of tropical disease had elected to spend his retirement gratuity on the purchase of a proprietary education establishment, aimed at the under 14 age group, which while today seeming elitist in concept may in fact have been a personal semi-philanthropic attempt to add his own experience-based take on education to that resource.

It’s an interesting point, though. However, it can sometimes be an error to assume that use of relatively rarely-employed terminology is intended to be specifically elitist or indicative of a permanently rigid concept of hierarchy.

[anon again]

There's always going to be a problem with any discussion on "upper echelons". Who are they? Knighted civil servants, regius chairs, hereditary aristocrats whose children get thirds because the whole concept of work goes against the ability to be at leisure (they are who they are through their father and grandfather before that)? And what of the upper professionals, those just hitting the mark and the upper to middle classes who clearly state that they would never dream of aspiring to upper class because they "know who they are" and being upper class, unless you are indeed the Queen, is plagued with ambition and aspiration in itself, and not the natural ability of riding things well. Perhaps the telling sign, actually, of someone still peddling are comments such as "On what level?" and "I had dinner with the Queen last week."...The key point is possibly not to care about the recognition and to keep on doing what one does, in public loyalty, i.e. one crowns the king but never becomes king oneself. The rest is, predictably, insecure and disappointing, especially when found in the heads of those with great ability who should, when the chips are down, take the reins and do what they have to do at times, within the freedom of their own volition. We all make attempts, it seems to me, and this should not stop; some do, sadly and in reality, make a more positive impact than others. It would be great if we could all do well.

[dr venables preller]

On checking source text of Motor Bus by A.D.Godley I see that the distance of time has added imperfection to my recollection, substituting See for Yes and Signifat for Indicat.

This raises the interesting question of reasons for inaccuracy of long term memory, usually trusted, but frequently prone to error.

There are many possible causes of such, including Freudian slips and confusion of some words with possible synonyms, whether in the initial understanding of meaning or in subsequent reinforcement or retrieval. There can also be dependence on the way the memory was imprinted or reinforced.

In this case, although I had originally been exposed to the poem by hearing it read out loud on several occasions about 52 years ago, and subsequently about three, eight and thirty years later, I have only read it in print twice, including today.

There is also the matter of physical damage and functional deterioriation of the brain, which can happen by vascular change exacerbated by age or loss of neurones perhaps through an unbalanced diet or excessive alcohol consumption. Anyone ever considering using any drug for so-called recreation should consider the risk of damage of a permanent nature. I have met people who had been considered of outstanding intellect before such experimentation who had subsequently undergone personality change and memory loss as a result.

It does seem that using the brain resource to as full an extent as possible helps to preserve its function.

[dr venables preller]

Some of these ditties may ring a bell, though aged 11 or so at the time, my recollection is of primary meaning only, even though generations of doodling in the somewhat worn kennedys had added some salacious imagery to the page margins.

'What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a motor bus?
See, the noise and hideous hum
signifat motorem bum' was, however,
frequently recited to assist our understanding of plurals by the retired Indian Civil Service Headmaster. Indian in this context refers to location rather than nationality, as my understanding is that the upper echelons were, at that time, Oxbridge expatriot.

[Tony Francis]

In medieval Latin, there was a distinguished tradition of writing in double and triple entendres. It was the mark of a brilliant writer. Perhaps the best were the goliards who mocked every institution of the day. Yet they could claim they weren't mocking anything. Some of their work can be found in the Carmina Burana:
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost13/CarminaBurana/bur_car0.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana
And the Cambridge Songs:
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost11/CarminaCantabrigiensia/can_car0.html
A popular method was to compose a riddle which had an innocent answer, and a salacious one. The famous goliard Peter Abelard fathered a child with his 18 year old student Heloise. She named the child Astrolabe, which is a triple entedre: an instrument to guide a ship; a celestial speaker and a celestial disgrace.
Percy Shelley's Ozymandias contains a hidden double entendre:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." Despair because Ozy was so great; or despair because they had fallen into ruin? Ozy was really Ramesses II:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II
The Egyptologist David Rohl has put forth a controversial theory which involves a Hebrew twist on the letters "SS" which he claims was a nick-name for Ramesses II and the biblical Shishak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rohl
His theory is a minority view. Sir Thomas More utilized double entendre in his book "Utopia". A Greek word, pronounced YOU-topia, it means beautiful country; pronounced OOH-topia, it means "no such place". We are not told how to pronounce it.

[Eileen]

fascinating post! I'd like to read the Stray article for myself, but in the meantime I wonder whether there might have been so sort of collaboration between the daughters and their father. For example did they work from his notes, or word lists? Perhaps Kennedy's intentions were not recognized by the spinster daughters.

[anon again]

On a lighter, less critical note, perhaps this equates in abusive terms to a woman in the City granting sexual favours to
six equally earning male colleagues to buy a house in the country? Is that better, less corrupt? What does "daring" mean beyond "being a fool, devoid of value and ultimate respect". Has that been worked out too yet? Is that about choice or is it some grand service? People easily criticise the Classics but are we better, more sophisticated now? Good luck with your translation, for future reference, Mary Beard. Please do draw it to our attention and all of us shall discuss. xx.

[Mary]

Well not specifically pederasty I suppose -- but I think the school boy dimension was in Cunningham's mind

[anthony alcock]

Why specifically pederasty ?

[Michael Bulley]

There is another article on this topic by Chris Stray, in the December 2003 issue of CA News. It contains many of the arguments that appear in the article available via the link above. I'd say that Stray was right to say in it that "the nature of the Latin language is independent of ideological agendas". The following issue of CA News (June 2004) includes four letters taking up Stray's piece, one from Kennedy's great-great grand-daughter, who underlines the fact that the rhymes were written, not by Kennedy, but by his daughters, Julia and Marian. She adds that the idea that these ladies might engage in paedophile innuendo via a grammar book is ludicrous. The balance of probability makes you think she is right.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

I knew Valentine Cunningham more than slightly. He is possessed of an astonishing range of learning, rises to high literary theory and criticism, has a fund of humour, and is very alive to linguistic nuance. I do not know the subject under disussion well enough to agree or disagree with Professor Cunningham but his remarks are never without interest. And one must remember that James Joyce took away linguistic innocence.

[The Heresiarch]

You don't even need to reach for Adams. Just imagine the late Frankie Howard reciting the list.