LSJ and proverbs: 'It takes a fox to catch a fox'

Greek proverbs are often translated idiomatically by a(n English) proverb that is thought to express the same received wisdom.

This practice is well exemplified s.v. ἀλώπηξ with English, French, and Latin idiomatic equivalents, but also a literal transation and explanation in the first instance.

Univerbation

This process has a page in Wikipedia, but does not have an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. It does appear in a citiation, though: s.v. preverb, n. and adj. A 1 (1989).

The English of Downton Abbey (1912-)

So might the English of Liddell-Scott-Jones (1925-1940) be described. To cite one example: In season 5, episode 3 (1924), Lady Mary Crawley remarked “Granny has a past!”.

In LSJ, s.v. προσκύλλω, one would read "molest before, Pass. προεσκυλμέναι women with a past, Vett. Val.120.6, cf. Heph.Astr.1.1.".

A quadrilingual funerary monument

Richard Brett, rector of Quainton, Buckinghamshire, served the translators of the Authorised Version (the First Oxford Company: the Major and Minor Prophets) apparently as a linguist. The funerary monument for himself and his family starts with a Hebrew inscription, then a Greek one, then a Latin one, and finally one in English.

So far, I have only found the English text in full:
"Instead of weeping marble weepe for him
All ye his flock whom he did strive to winn
To Christ, to lyfe; so shall you duly sett
The most desired stone on Dr Brett."

The Latin apparently said that the best monumentfor a pastor is his congregation.

A round up

Alcibiades' lisp? (from Johnson at the Economist). Thence too, the suffixes -ikos and -ismos (the book rather than the example specifically).

Trivia about the lengths of Greek words inter alia. Please remember that the longest word in English is smiles, because there's a mile in the middle.

Latin and Greek vocab lists from a much respected former teacher.

Carl Sesar's Catullus 53 (on pp. 658-659) and 58 (at p. 11).

Tag questions, you know?

From the contemporary poet, Tailor Malli.

Denominal word formation

There is a (long-standing) fad for forming verbs from nouns in English. Read all about it at 'You've been verbed', in Intelligent Life.

"Words do not live in dictionaries. They live in the mind."

The only surviving recording of the frightfully well-spoken Virginia Woolf features her discussion of the life of words and her reproach for dictionaries:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7684225.stm>. A tricolon of asyndetic privative adjectives makes a guest appearance too.

Ovid spoke English

Mediaeval Christian scholars deduced from the following lines in Ovid's Metamorphoses, about a/the Great Flood, that Ovid knew the Old Testament:

Occupat hic collem, cumba sedet alter adunca
et ducit remos illic, ubi nuper ararat
(Met 293-4).

'One man perches on a hilltop, another sits in a curved boat and pulls on his oars in the place where he had just been ploughing.'

Ararat is of course the name of the hill upon which Noah's Ark came to rest. (see Ryder, 'Ovid, the Flood, and Ararat', G&R14 (1967) 126-9).

We can now extend this to the discovery that Ovid spoke English. In Book 3, Narcissus - a model of inverted desire, like many others in the poem - addresses himself as follows:

quid faciam? roger anne rogem? quid deinde rogabo? (Met 3.465)

'What do I do? Do I get propositioned, or proposition? And what do I ask for?'

Ovid verbally signals the paradox of erotic self-pursuit with the words 'roger anne', a boy's name next to a girl's name.

~Typhon