English dictionary of ancient Greek gets a vulgar update complete with F-bombs - CBC.ca - Dictionary

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For the past hundred or so years, classics students who looked up the ancient Greek verb χέζω in a commonly used English dictionary would find it modestly translated as "Ease oneself, do one's need."

Now, the translation is "To sh-t."

That much cruder translation can be found in the Cambridge Greek Lexicon, a new dictionary two decades in the making that took a deep look at the meaning of ancient Greek words, after they were tempered by Victorian translators. 

"We aim to get the flavour of the original words, and to do that we have to use modern English, even if that English is a bit vulgar," Cambridge emeritus professor and editor in chief James Diggle told As It Happens host Carol Off.

'Spare no blushes'

The idea to update Liddell and Scott's widely used 1889 Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon was proposed by the late scholar John Chadwick in 1997. At the time, the plan was for it to be completed in five years.  

But Diggle, who was then chair of the advisory committee, says it became clear that they were in for a lot of work. 

"We quickly discovered that the original conception that we had, which was to revise an existing dictionary, was a non-starter," Diggle said. 

So, they started from scratch. 

A Sotheby's curator thumbs through The Clouds by Aristophanes. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

The team took on the enormous task of re-reading most of ancient Greek literature — from Homer to the early second century AD. The resulting two volumes were recently published by Cambridge University Press.

"It was a moment of enormous relief and delight, because for at least 15 years, the project had taken over my life and I'd had time for nothing else," Diggle said. 

The new dictionary takes a much more colourful approach to words that don't pander to Victorian sensibilities. It doesn't obscure curse words with hyphens.

"We spare no blushes," Diggle said in a news release.

That is not true of the original dictionary that inspired the project. 

"Much of the language that it uses is old-fashioned," Diggle said. "It's the kind of language that was used by Victorian school teachers, perhaps, and it simply doesn't cover enough of the literature for the needs of modern students." 

For example, the verb βινέω was described as "inire, coire, of illicit intercourse" by the Victorian translators. Diggle says that meaning isn't "strictly right." So they simply translated it to "f--k." 

In the 19th-century dictionary, λαικάζω was translated as "to wench." It now translates to "sucks c--ks," which Diggle guesses is "the first time that will have appeared in a dictionary." 

Diggle says these new translations will give students reading these ancient texts a much richer experience, even if it is cruder. 

"It should give them very, very much easier comprehension of what they read on the text of Aristophanes' Lysistrata."

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Written by Sarah Jackson. Produced  by Katie Geleff.