Vincit Motto
This is so fun!
Times Online Blogs - Want a motto? Do it in Latin., by Mary Beard (rofessor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS)
I am delighted to see that some of the contributors to the great British national motto competition realised that a bit of Latin might help out here. For it is truth universally acknowledged that a society in search of a slogan, must be in need of Latin – which usually puts things snappier and shorter and cleverer than the poor old English vernacular.
I mean, could you ever capture “Per Ardua ad Astra” quite so neatly in our mother tongue? “Through struggles to the stars” seems horribly cumbersome. It’s actually only one word more, it feels more like three times as long. (There were in fact a couple of ‘tribute’ parodies of this posted..”Per ardua ad nauseam” — or “Per ardua ad Robin Reliant (cant afford an astra)“)
And it goes on! Isn’t that fun? I wish I could speak Latin enough to pun in it…
November 28th, 2007 at 1:26 am
I was in the tourist tat shop on Edinburgh and I came upon a Clan Red shot glass (since the Reds are an ancient northern English family of farm labourers of no known distinction I’m assuming Clan Red’s just a way of making money from us) bearing the motto “Nil Sine Labore” (nothing but through work). I couldn’t help thinking that was so appropriate for generations of Red ancestors, who would have settled for nil quite readily, as long as it came sine labore. Only it didn’t - you worked your socks off and still got nil.