...I want this election to be over.

[ricardienne]

An acquaintance from music camp, with whom I'm facebook friends, keeps posting "Obama is the most pro-abortion senator in the world" and "being "pro-choice" is like being pro-slavery" and "Obama wants 12 year olds to get abortions without telling their parents" notes (re: that last, I shall not of course point out that it's a little weird to claim that a fetus has rights over its body irrespective of it's mother's desires, but that a child doesn't), and it is getting ANNOYING.

So instead, I am going to post this bit of Quintilian (transl. D.A. Russell) complaining about people who point and giggle about *perfectly innocent* phrases:

...what is called cacephaton. This consists either in a phrase perverted by bad usage so as to give an obscene meaning, as by those who (if you can believe it) get a laugh out of ductare exercitus ["take the army home/to bed"] and patrare bellum ["finish off the war/pretty boy"], which are respectable but old-fashioned expressions in Sallust (this is not, in my judgement, the writers' fault but the readers', but it is none the less to be avoided, inasmuch as our moral decline has led to the lost of respectable words, and we have to yield even to vices if they are winning), or in a collocation of word which has an unfortunate sound: of we say cum hominibus notis loqui ("to speak with famous men") without the inserted hominibus [heh: inserted], we find ourselves falling into something objectionble, because the last letter of the first syllable (m), which cannot be pronounced without closing the lips either forces us to pause in a very unbecoming way, or, if joined to the next letter (n), is assimilated to it [sc: cum + notis = cunno... = like in English]... And it is not only in writing that this occurs: many people are keen to understand a sentence in an obscene sense, unless you take precautions (as Ovid says, "whatever's hiddne, they think best"), and to seize on indecency in words which are far from having any obscene meaning. Celsus, for instance, sees cacemphaton in Vergil's they are stirred and start to swell but if you take this iew, nothing is safe to say.