ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR

“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice timidly: “some of the words have got altered.”

From Reader #3

Perhaps the best way to apprehend the crass carelessness of Work of Human Hands and the woeful thinness of Anthony Cekada’s learning is to examine closely a small sample of errors. The Reader’s random selection includes downright boneheaded howlers as well as mistakes that seem trivial at first blush but magnify themselves when considered against all the noisy, false claims of exacting scholarship. To err is indeed human, but the occurrence of so many mistakes corroborates the Reader’s contention that the book is not serious.

Caution: THE FOLLOWING exercise IS not INTENDED

for the grammatically faint of heart.

Let’s begin at the beginning, where (under the front matter “Other Abbreviations”) we find Tempus Pentecostis. Anthony Cekada prints the word as a Latin third declension genitive singular. However, in the Roman Missal and Breviary (and in real liturgical authors) the word is Pentecostes, a Greek genitive of the first declension. The blunder reveals a breathtaking ignorance of official Roman books and the Vulgate. The Reader wonders why the correct form could not stick in his head after so many years of saying Mass and reading the Office.

On the same page, we have another tell-tale boner. This time it’s not one of morphology but of usage. Against “Ember Days,” Anthony Cekada writes Quatuor Temporum (genitive plural) where he should have used the nominative plural Tempora, the correct Latin for a section header or an index entry (v.g., in the Missal and Breviary’s treatise De Anno et Ejus Partibus or in De Herdt’s index to his three-volume Sacræ Liturgiæ Praxis). The genitive Temporum is found in the Missal and Breviary, but that form commonly appears after the name of a day of the week (e.g., Feria IV Quatuor Temporum ‘on Ember Wednesday’). He really should have tried to stay awake in Latin class, or perhaps he should have read the Missal and Breviary with more attention.

It isn’t surprising if you’ve read the man, but Anthony Cekada’s ignorance of syntax and morphemes is so broad that it extends to English, too. In hazarding a literary translation of Psalm 42, on p. 204 he writes “Why art thou sad, o [sic] my soul? And why does thou disquiet me.” Every schoolboy knows that it should be dost. This isn’t a "printer’s error" since he produced the electronic text. This is Anthony Cekada’s bad ear for archaic English and his ignorance of morphemes. He has a similar mistake on p. 189, where his translation of the vesting prayer for the chasuble reads, “O Lord, who has said, ‘My yoke is sweet and My burden light,' grant that I may carry it as to merit Thy grace.” The archaic possessive adjective “Thy” would tell the literate man to use the archaic hast, the “Biblical” second person singular, since the prayer addresses the Lord directly (the Latin verb dixisti ‘you have said’ is second person singular). The third person singular has is an option neither in archaic nor in modern English.

Anthony Cekada is wrong from beginning to end. Bottom line: spare your pocketbook and your sensibilities. Take our advice and just say NO! when he asks you to buy his tattered wares.

Within the Octave