Word: pluperfect
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...school, I loathed Latin, in general, but I detested Virgil in particular. After you'd spent hours wading through conjugations and declensions and ablative absolutes and gerunds and pasts perfect, imperfect and pluperfect, there was the pointless torture of learning and then reciting lines of dactylic hexameter about this bloke wandering aimlessly around the Mediterranean at the whim of a perpetually pissed-off goddess. I mean, even Milton was more fun than that...
...Granted, no one lands in the hospital after even the most impassioned discussions of the relative merits of indicative perfect and indicative pluperfect verb tenses. But linguistic travails do complicate cultural exchanges: when we (try to) communicate there’s a real sense of rift here, like someone’s jammed the telephone line and all that’s coming out is white noise...
...more I study, and the more easily the subjunctive pluperfect comes to me in conversation, the more I am convinced that some things just don’t translate. Exhibit A: finding an adequate Spanish counterpart for the word “jolly” (the closest we got was “bárbaro” – like “awesome,” but less painfully Californian surfer dude). Exhibit B: explaining the idiom, “to gird up one’s loins.” (My professor’s attempt...