“Elizabeth I revealed as the translator of Tacitus into English”
Translating scholarly Latin into sophisticated English was an amazing level of scholarship for someone who was perhaps the most powerful person in the world. Inspired by this revelation, Trump plans to translate some of his own speeches into sophisticated English.
I have warned you before about using sock puppets. Find another place to post.
That argument has no bearing on his use of the world “bigly.” In the sense that he allegedly used it, neither bigly nor largely would have worked. It was just plain ign’rant. He said “We will speed up the process bigly.”
“We will speed up the process largely” would make no sense .
“We will speed up the process loudly and boastfully” (the historical meaning of “bigly”) would make sense, given that it was Trump, but is certainly not the sense that he intended, which was “dramatically” or “greatly.”
Yes, people do use it now, but mostly to make fun of Trump.
To be fair, both Trump and his spokesperson claimed that he never said bigly in the first place, and the transcripts do support that position.
So what I should have said is: “Some four hundred years later, the most powerful person in the world is so completely illiterate that he speaks at a fourth-grade level,” a fact which has been documented by using the Flesch-Kincaid scale.
Tacitus is no stroll in the park to translate either. Not as difficult as Thucydides (100 years after he was gone there were already big arguments among Greeks about what the hell he meant by the key phrase he used to describe how he was presenting the speeches) but not easy meat like Caesar or Xenophon. Kind of in the same league as Plutarch who was writing his Greek half a millennium after the Athenian age. And obviously Elizabeth didn’t have anything like Perseus, the Loeb texts or modern commentaries to help her out. As always one impressive woman.
The Trump dig is not gratuitous in this case. It demonstrates the progress of the knowledge base and education possessed by the leadership of the human race, from one of its highest peaks to arguably its lowest valley. Around 1600, the most powerful person in the world was so literate and educated, with such powers of concentration, that she could translate scholarly Latin into English. Some four hundred years later, the most powerful person in the world is so completely illiterate that he thinks “bigly” is a word meaning “dramatically.”
As he himself says:
A Trump dig is always in good taste, even when delivered (however unintentionally) by Trump.
Not seeing the part where Liz 1 gets trivialized
He would lose his base if he did that.