PIG AND PEPPER

“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he’s perfectly idiotic!”

From Reader #3

You can’t put lipstick on a pig, and that’s why I must take exception with Reader #1 for his intolerable tolerance of Anthony Cekada’s misspelling of Regensburg. In this day of instant verification via the Internet, there’s no excusing such a slip. (Psst! I suspect that Fr. Cekada thought Regensberg was right in the first place.) Although Father is a creature of limited gifts, his ego knows no bounds, so he’s ever quite sure of himself in spite of his handicaps. Many correspondents have told us that offering correction to Anthony Cekada is like trying to plow the sands of the sea. Accordingly, as a warning to consumers, here are just four of his boo-boos that a simple quick check could have prevented.

I. The transcriptional goof on page 38 belies all that Internet billing and cooing about the book’s being Ph.D.-level effort by a “theologian-scholar.” Fr. Cekada, perhaps following Bouyer, prints “Qehal Yaweh” instead of the scholarly q^ehal Yahweh. Since I don’t want to nitpick, I might adopt some of Reader #1’s forbearance and ignore the failure to represent the šĕwā’ by a superscripted e in the first word; however, aitch dropping in Yahweh is another matter. Without the additional consonant, removing the vowels would not produce the Tetragrammaton (YHWH, יהוה). In any case, Fr. Cekada’s “Yaweh” is just plain wrong in genteel scholarship (as well as in the more proletarian tradition he comes from). Just think: a little Googling could have saved him from the Reader’s woodshed.

II. On p. 88, toward the bottom of note 16, this poorly tutored priest assures us parenthetically that the Georgian language is “a Slavic dialect.” Saints preserve us! Georgian, an agglutinative language, is member of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language family and has several dialects of its own. Slavic languages are fusional (inflective) and belong to the Indo-European family of languages. All he had to do was to consult the Wikipedia!

III. In spite of his note 1 on page 103, rubrica does not mean “red things,” as though it were a neuter plural adjective (from *rubrīcus, -a, -um) used as a substantive. In classical and ecclesiastical Latin, it is a singular noun, originally meaning ‘red ochre’ (the pigment). Later it came to signify a chapter heading in a book of law, painted red, from which developed the liturgical meaning. The word looks like an adjective because it used to agree with the appellative terra ‘earth,’ which was dropped several thousand years ago. We wouldn’t expect Fr. Cekada to know that, but we would expect him to go online if he doesn’t have a good etymological dictionary or Latin lexicon at hand.

IV. In his bibliography (p. 414) and throughout the book (e.g., under “Bibliographical Abbreviations” and p. 317), Fr. Cekada spells the alternate (i.e., German edition) title of Jungmann’s Mass of the Roman Rite as Missarum Solemnia (!) with one l. Just a closer look at the title page of the English translation, which he used, or a query on Google Books (or a search on the Verlag Nova & Vetera site) would have revealed the true spelling: Sollemnia. By the way, genuine scholars who didn’t have trouble with Latin know that the occasional spelling with one l is very far from correct. The right spelling always has two l's.

Bottom line: you wouldn’t buy a pig in a poke, so why would you buy Work of Human Hands after the Reader has shown you the nasty slop inside?

Feast of St. Juliana Falconieri