Osculating Words: A Maxim Worthy of the Grassroots

Consider the following line from Horace:

Carpe diem, quam minimum crēdula posterō.

Let’s first take this apart, word-by-word, to see what grammar lurks behind the scenes.

Carpe:

The infinitive carpere means “to pluck, pick, gather” as in plucking fruit or a blossom. It’s a third conjugation verb. Carpe is in the 2nd person singular, present, imperative, active form. In short, this is a command: “Pluck!” At this moment we don’t yet know to whom it’s addressed.

diem:

diēs is a fifth declension masculine noun meaning “day.” The case here is accusative, diem, since “day” is the direct object of the verb Carpe.

crēdula:

Editor John C. Traupman’s New College Latin & English Dictionary (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 67, lists this as an adjective meaning “trustful.” Being declined in the feminine singular form, crēdula, we now know Horace was addressing a woman. According to the lore I just looked up, Leuconoe was the intended recipient of his poem, who may or may not have been a real person.

Traupman goes on to note crēdula can be modified itself by a dative noun, idiomatically becoming “trusting in.” See below.

minimum:

This is a superlative adjective, here declined as singular, neuter, accusative. It’s part of the positive/comparative/superlative trio, parvus/minor/minimus (“little, littler, littlest”). Idiomatically, when combined in this form with quam, the phrase behaves as an adverb with the meaning “as little as possible.”

quam:

This is half of the correlative pair tam/quam (“as…as”). By itself here, it serves as an adverb.

posterō:

Meaning “next” or “following,” this adjective (whose nominative is posterus) appears here in the masculine singular dative case. It’s directly modifying the unspoken noun diēī, “day.” This is a day different from the one explicitly phrased within the sentence. So, posterō is shorthand for the full form diēī posterō, meaning “the next day.” As mentioned above, idiomatically this dative becomes an adverbial phrase modifying crēdula.

Supplying all the assumed parts to make the grammar explicit, I believe Horace’s injunction would become:

Carpe diem, Leuconoe, quam minimum crēdula diēī posterō.

Again, attempting to shine light on the grammar, a wordy and stilted translation would be:

“Pluck this day, Leuconoe, you being the least possible easy of trust in the next day.”

Given that plucked fruit is a juicy feast to the palate, a more efficient and poetic version which I think retains Horace’s intention would be:

“Savor this day, trusting as little as possible in the next.”

What I find so fascinating about Horace’s construction is the absence of the explicit present participle “trusting as little…” instead relying upon the adjective crēdula to indicate what his recipient should be doing. I say this, for in my limited experience of Latin, it seems to me the Romans were far more crazed with participles than English speakers.

Something else that strikes me comes from Noam Chomsky’s notion of transformational grammar. If we accept that a thought first exists in the mind, then goes through a serious of transformations before exiting as a complete linguistic entity (i.e., a “sentence,”), then the following is most curious. In English, after the sentence exits the mouth, quite a bit of what was in the original thought (various aspects of number, gender, case and so forth) is sublimated, and for all intents and purposes lost. But with Latin, that final sentence retains all of the raw data. As seen above, it might take some doing to recover it, but it’s still there.

For instance, “Carpe diem… crēdula …” Thanks to the ending of crēdula, we know the 2nd person recipient of the imperative is a woman. (One would use crēdulus for a man, by contrast). That information is there. But consider the English version “Pluck the day…trusting…” We have no idea to what sex this is being addressed. It may have been in the speaker’s original thoughts, but was lost after going through Chomsky’s transformations to become a complete sentence, and can never be found again.

So as I see it, both Latin and English, like all languages, encode thoughts to sentences. But only Latin permits one to work backwards from the sentence to the original thought in all its detail. It’s almost as if the English speaker is hedging his or her bets, in fear of being taken to task or held accountable. The Roman had no such qualms and proudly signed the portrait of thought.

Curious, don’t you think?

But back to the essence of the maxim. “Seize the day—full-stop”, is the all too common christo-capitalist take. Seizing is for the J. Pierpont Morgans of this world, but savoring is for the Lord Henrys.

No, the real meaning, for both syntactic and philosophical reasons, is: