The Mistaken Critic, or a Discourse on the Word (11-15)

But no! not yet. First about that ‘ nefandous.’

Tell me, in the name of Aphrodite Pandemus and the Genetyllides[*] and Cybebe, in what respect did you think the word nefandous objectionable and fit to be laughed at? Oh, because it did not belong to the Greeks, but had somehow thrust its way in among them from their intercourse with Celts or Thracians or Scyths; wherefore you—for you know everything that pertains to the Athenians—excluded it at once and banished it from the Greek world, and your laughter was because I committed a barbarism and used a foreign idiom and went beyond the Attic bounds!

“Come now, what else is as well established on Athenian soil as that word?” people would say who are better informed than you about such matters. It would be easier for you to prove Erechtheus and Cecrops foreigners and invaders of Attica, than to show that ‘ nefandous ’ is not at home and indigenous in Attica. There are many things which they designate in the same way as everybody else, but they, and they alone, designate as nefandous a day which is vile, abominable, inauspicious, useless, and like you.

There now! I have already taught you in passing what they mean by nefandous!

When official business is not transacted, introduction of lawsuits is not permissible, sacrifice of victims is not performed, and, in general, nothing is done that requires good omens, that day is nefandous.

The custom was introduced among different peoples in different ways; either they were defeated in great battles and subsequently established that those days on which they had undergone such misfortunes should be useless and invalid for their customary transactions, or, indeed—but it is inopportune, perhaps, and by now unseasonable to try to alter an old man’s education and reinstruct him in such matters when he does not know even what precedes them.[*] It can hardly be that this is all that remains, and that if you learn it, we shall have you fully informed! Nonsense, man! Not to know those other expressions which are off the beaten path and obscure to ordinary folk is pardonable; but even if you wished, you could not say nefandous in any other way, for that is everyone’s sole and only word for it.

“Well and good,” someone will say, “but even in the case of time-honoured words, only some of them are to be employed, and not others, which are unfamiliar to the public, that we may not disturb the wits and wound the ears of our hearers.” My dear sir, perhaps as far as you are concerned I was wrong to say that to you about yourself; yes, yes, I should have followed the folk-ways of the Paphlagonians or the Cappadocians or the Bactrians in conversing with you, that you might fully understand what was being said and it might be pleasing to your ears. But Greeks, I take it, should be addressed in the Greek tongue. Moreover, although even the Athenians in

I should have named those who have employed the word before our time, were I not certain to disturb you in this way also, by reciting names of poets and rhetoricians and historians that would be foreign to you, and beyond your ken. No, I shall not name those who have used it, for they are known to all; but do you point me out one of the ancients who has not employed the word and your statue shall be set up, as the saying goes, in gold at Olympia. Indeed, any old man, full of years, who is unacquainted with such expressions is not, I think, even aware that the city of Athens is in Attica, Corinth at the Isthmus, and Sparta in the Peloponnese.