Yesterday, doing my weekly run through of new videos posted on Ted.com I came across this fun little reinterpretation of the “encyclopedia game” (which, yes, some of us used to play when I was a kid – it’s the kind of thing that nerds do):

…and, it got me thinking that it might be fun to sort of play along with the idea in a series of mini-posts here, to break up the steady stream of restaurants and cooking. Not that those are a bad thing, but just for fun, you understand. This may not last long, or it may continue. So I’ll keep these to very short posts from this point on and add links that you can either check out or not – one a day, and maybe you’ll play too. Rather than pick a topic myself, I used Wikipedia’s “random article” feature to kick this off (I will not necessarily stay within Wikipedia for this, it was just a starting point), and will continue from there on the “I didn’t know this” basis mentioned in the video.

Dog Latin (Canis latinicus?), a.k.a. cod Latin, macaronic Latin, or mock Latin is not the same thing as “pig latin” that we used to use as kids or that our parents used to use hoping that we kids didn’t understand it. Nor should it be confused with “dogg latin” or “nig latin” (hey, I didn’t make it up), which the Urban Dictionary defines as pig latin using the ebonics “izzle” instead of “ay”. There are basically two definitions – one is when someone generally tries to write in Latin but simply does a poor job of it, the other, and more common, is when pseudo-Latin phrases or words, or actual Latin words are mixed with English, either way, in order to come across sounding scholarly. Most often, it’s done with a humorous intent. Allowing me to tie this to my general themes on this blog, a perfect example would be from Sam Weller’s Budget of Recitations published by J. Clement (1838) (which, apparently there’s some debate on whether it was written by Charles Dickens because the fictional character Sam Weller appears in The Pickwick Papers, or by another author as a parody of that character) – the definition of a “kitchen”:

“Now, in the first place, they have called a kitchen my client’s premises. Now a kitchen is nobody’s premises. a kitchen is not a warehouse nor a washhouse, a brewhouse nor a bakehouse; an outhouse nor an innhouse, nor a dwelling house, nor any house; no, my lud, ’tis absolutely and bona fide, neither more nor less than a kitchen; or as the law more classically expresses, a kitchen is, camera necescuria pro usus cookare; cum sauce pannis, stewpannis, scullero, dressero, coalholo, stovis, smoakjacko; pro rostandum, boilandum, fryandum, et plum puddings mixandum, pro turtle soupes, calves head hashibus, cum calipee et calipashibus.”

People have written entire books in this “language”.

Back tomorrow with next entry – in the meantime, the next post will be the weekend’s dinners.