Slashdot Mirror

I think it's amazing how spam has changed the way that people think about email. When I first got online, I had one email address, and I used it to talk with friends, order from online retailers, et cetera -- and I never got any spam at all. Then, slowly, the spam started to trickle in, and I started being more wary about who I gave my address to. It continued to get worse, and then came the turning point when spam became something that I expected, loathingly. Then came another turning point, when I ditched my old spam-ridden email address for a free webmail account, in hopes of getting away from it all. Ha!

Today, I have about ten webmail accounts, and all of them -- even Yahoo! Mail, the best -- gets spam. The worse -- Hotmail -- is completely unusable, even with filtering on.

I have a mail server of my own that I use for my websites, but I'm terrified to actually use any of the accounts on it in fear that a spammer will start dictionary-fucking my domains. So I never use any of these accounts -- I don't even give the addresses to my friends. I tell everyone to use the webmail accounts, in hopes that one day, in the future, spam will somehow been defeated, and I can then use and even publish email addresses associated with my websites. But I may be forced to soon, as Yahoo! Mail will probably be completely fucked within a year, and I'll have to either find a new webmail provider or bite the bullet, open my mail server, and RTBL the fuck out of everything.

Spam also changes the way that you read email. I use HTML mail, which makes it even worse -- did you know that some spammers use CGI image generation (with a unique ID encoded in the URL) so that even viewing an HTML mail spam will confirm your email address? So when I look at my mail, I first scan the subjects carefully, deleting the obvious spam. This gets rid of 95% of the spam. The other 5% I open very quickly, ready to close my browser if I'm at work and some sort of porn ad pops up.

Those "bulk email folders" that Yahoo! and Hotmail use are nice, but you still have to review all of the senders and subjects of email directed there, in case a valid email was falsely identified as spam.

God, I hate it, I HATE IT. I'm not a violent person, but if I could push a button and kill all spammers everywhere in an instant, I'd fucking do it without hesitation. I'm not sure why it pisses us off so much while junk mail and telemarketing don't piss us off so much. It's more than the waste of disk space and bandwidth. Maybe it's because we grew up with junk mail and telemarketing, but email has only become popular in the nineties, and it was so nice at first that we came to expect email to always be a high signal/noise ratio method of communication.

I don't know.

I DON'T LIKE SPAM.

Don't trust the government.

The_Messenger

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

Oh come on. Spam is going to level the political playing field about as much as the Internet leveled the business playing field. Do people buy more books from amazon.com or from Wobberly's ? If an underdog mounts an email campaign, an overdog mounts a bigger email campaign. Duh!

People still cling to the quaint vision of democracy in America rising from the ashes because of some magic ring that can only be worn by the good guys. There's no such thing!

America is governed by lobbyists and PACs who have successfully cracked the system. The only way I can think of to win is not to play the game. Instead of competing make money irrelevant, for example by making Congress sort of like a priesthood, wherein elected officials relinquish all material goods for the rest of their lives and live on a modest stipend. Something like that might work. Yeah, like it would ever happen.

The stupid fuckhead asshole pieces of shit editors and the fags that post are fucking wrong - as usual.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969

The stupid fuckhead asshole pieces of shit editors and the fags that post are fucking wrong - as usual.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969

Why? Partly because hardly anyone has even heard of SourceForge. Guess it's hard to get advertising funds giving away shit for free, eh Larry? It's not even a question of whether you went to business school; it's a question of whether you learned algebra. Maybe you should study basic arithmetic before looking for a new job. I'll help you start: it is necessary to understand the concept of "zero" to calculate negative numbers, such as, to give a completely random example, VA Software's potential revenue. To learn about zeros, try following Michael Sims around for a few days. *Ahem...*

The primary, most important reason why Source Forge is about as popular as OpenBSD is because it fucking sucks. I've evaluated the damn thing, and now I use it as one of my example reasons not to trust Open Source. Wow, does it suck! With so many good project management tools to steal ideas from, I'm amazed that SourceForge didn't turn out to be less,you know, fucking sucky.

Oh, wait, I know... it's because most project management tools cost money, right? Sorry, I know that's a sticking point with you Open Source amateurs. It must suck, living in a world wherein things cost money. Us real developers would to help you out, really, but we're too busy spending the gobs of money that we make, every day! Anyway, it must be tough. not being able to buy commercial software from which to steal ideas. I imagine that if Windows 98 weren't so readily available, GNOME wouldn't be half the lame piece of shit that it is now.

Let's recap... in order to make money from developing a project management tool, you have to sell it. Dictionary.com defines "to sell" as "to exchange or deliver for money or its equivalent. ". This my first point: to make money, don't give products away for free. Now, here comes the complicated part: in order to sell a product, the product must be in demand. A project management tool will be in demand if it offers superior functionality and reliability at a reasonable price. Now SourceForge is impressive -- for a hobby project. But when compared to professional tools -- used by the professionals whose money you hope to obtain -- it just can't hold up to scrutiny. It's like comparing The GIMP to Photoshop... the GIMP is great for free-as-in-beer software, but it isn't even in the same league as Photoshop, and thus graphics professionals choose Photoshop over the GIMP despite the fact that the GIMP is free-as-in-beer.

You can't stop the Open-Source failure juggernaut, so stop trying. Maybe it's time to update the old résumé, boys...

My Resumay
by Rob Malda

1997-Present: Perl guy, Slashdot.org
I rote a lot of the Perl scripts on this populer Open-Source/Free Softwear news site. I am good at Perl, wich is teh best because Lunix is wrote in Perl! (I use Lunix.) I made fun of Micorsoft, and played a lot of games on my Windows box. (It is'nt my fualt, cuz Loki don't port DIABLO ][!) I also disocerved anime^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwatched a lot of anime, becuz I have ben a fan of teh anime and I haev watched it for years, dispite that wut that lamer The_Messenger sez about me being a "newbie latecommer wannabbe". DZB is teh best!! I helped Slashdot marge with VA Lunix^H^H^H^HSo^H^H^HSoftwaer, whitch is a vary good company but now they are broke becuz teh buzniss world wuz not ready for Open-Source Softwares :( but! it is not because open Sources is not a vayable busznis straegy, realy!! Haevn't u read teh catherdal and teh bazar? ;) Anyways I am good at teh Perl and I hate bill gates and he eats poo!

Your reputation is soured. All of you are cursed for having been associated with Slashdot.org. Shut down SourceForge, shut down Slashdot, take out a loan from your ThinkGeek friends, and spend the cash on Ramen and bottled water so that you'll survive the long, cold winter in whatever lame hick religion-crazed midwest state you live in. The joyride is over. The advertising revenue is gone. All that's left is a group of sweaty, immature Perl guys and a couple grand worth of slow Intel hardware. Shut it all down, recoup your losses, and help Larry buy those new brakes.

Oh, yeah, and click here for porn.

This must be a difficult time of year for Cheap Software bigots. Those of you who aren't naive college students have no money to buy gifts, and surely no gifts will be given to the hostile, irritable, unhygienic "developers" (ha!) whom we have to thank for such monuments of shit as Mozilla and SourceForge. I'd be sad, too, having to watch highly-paid Closed Source developers stroll down the street, arms laden with expensive gifts, surrounded by beautiful women.

And speaking of women, I just remembered that Valentine's Day is only two months away! You think that you'll be able to find a girlfriend by then, hog? Or will you spend another year cold and alone, trying to convince yourself that playing Counter-Strike with 15-year-old illiterates is really better than hot, greasy sex?

Perhaps you should look to homosexuality, the traditional sexual outlet of the Cheap Software "developer." Sure, it may hurt a bit, and your ass may leak blood and semen for 72 hours afterward, but anything is better than being alone on Christmas... isn't it?

Anyway, as I was saying, if making up fairy tales about Santa and Linux helps you survive another holiday season, fine. But it isn't helping your cause, and it isn't improving the real world's outlook on Cheap Software. Why not get some exercise, take a shower, put on some nice clothes, buy (or steal) some expensive chocolates and wine, walk down to your nearest singles bar, and... slit your wrists in the bathroom? Thanks!

-- The_Messenger

Oh, wait -- you didn't think that lobstermen actually go out to the ocean in boats and catch lobsters, do you? That's pretty fucking ignorant. I'll bet you've never even been on the East Coast.

"Lobsterman" means the same thing in New Hampshire as it means in Maine and all over New England: hoary old NAMBLA members with beards and raincoats who divide their time between fucking kids and supporting union "labor." Maybe, on the farm where you were born, all words mean what they seem to, be we New England folks are sophisticated. Why, we even have a special word for loud-but-ineffective leftist homosexuals past their prime: "stallman." Just as lobstermen aren't "men who catch lobsters," stallmen aren't "men in stalls." Inceidentally, stallmen can often be found in public bathroom stalls, but that's just one of their many habitats. Stallmen tend to congregate around overrated educational institutions. Recently, stallman subcultures have developed in China and Slovenia. For more information on these annoying, filthy beasts, see the stallman homepage.

-- The_Messenger

KKK
aal
pru
pmb
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http://www.geocities.com/trolltuesday2k1/

When I was a young boy, I awoke every morning to the delicious smell of penis. My father and his boyfriend's vegetarian health store contained within it a hot griddle perfect for making penis, anus, and a multitude of other stinky snacks. I remember them well -- The pleasant, care-free days of my childhood in the dojo were often spent peering into the kitchen with eager anticipation as my father prepared penis my family.

As I grew older, and began my journey to homosexual enlightenment, the memories of my penis-eating youth filled my heart and dreams with warm, fluffy goodness....Ahhh, yes..the sweet, sweet memories... The day I ate 10 penises... The day I placed a warm penis between my fleshy loins and performed the forbidden dance... The day pressed a penis to my buttocks and encouraged my dog to come eat.. Indeed, much of my childhood was spent in pure innocence -- An innocence only penis can provide. It was heaven. A heaven, filled with penis, where I sat at the throne of God, with my hand-maidens Rob Malda and Jeff Bates seated beside me. An indestructible triumvirate made of flesh, blood, semen, and love.

By the age of 15, the path of my life became unclear and confusing. Torn between my duty my health club and my love for penis, I foolishly left home in search of karaguchi ah-nowakadesu..The ultimate penis. My journey took me to the many streets of LA, many days away from the health club. My hunger for penis became my teacher, and foolishly I let it control the path that I fucked upon. My mouth, sore from sucking, ached as my heart and stomach did, until I came to a realization. My duty was clear. I needed to take a stand and accept my love for the art of vegetarian cuisine AND my love for penis. It was not wrong for me to love both. I love one as a dear friend, and one as a lover. Yes--My mission was clear--I must become a faggot, a secret pervert hired by Sarcasta BUT I MUST ALSO ENJOY THE OCCASIONAL penis.

My adoration for genetalia has placed me within an awkward position. Many faggots refuse to recognize me as their brother. I defend my father's land, but I am looked upon as weak and undisciplined. I tell them, "But, brothers! Listen to my plea! The penises do not weaken me, nor do they make me disobey the rule of my vegeables. They fill me with love." But alas, they do not understand...For the mind of a faggot is complex.

My only earthly desire is to be accepted for who I am. Yes, I am a FAGGOT--But I also enjoy penis. Will you accept me? If you were approached by a faggot who requested a penis, would you submit to his will?

- A Penis-Eatin' Faggot

When I was a young boy, I awoke every morning to the delicious smell of penis. My father and his boyfriend's vegetarian health store contained within it a hot griddle perfect for making penis, anus, and a multitude of other stinky snacks. I remember them well -- The pleasant, care-free days of my childhood in the dojo were often spent peering into the kitchen with eager anticipation as my father prepared penis my family.

As I grew older, and began my journey to homosexual enlightenment, the memories of my penis-eating youth filled my heart and dreams with warm, fluffy goodness....Ahhh, yes..the sweet, sweet memories... The day I ate 10 penises... The day I placed a warm penis between my fleshy loins and performed the forbidden dance... The day pressed a penis to my buttocks and encouraged my dog to come eat.. Indeed, much of my childhood was spent in pure innocence -- An innocence only penis can provide. It was heaven. A heaven, filled with penis, where I sat at the throne of God, with my hand-maidens Rob Malda and Jeff Bates seated beside me. An indestructible triumvirate made of flesh, blood, semen, and love.

By the age of 15, the path of my life became unclear and confusing. Torn between my duty my health club and my love for penis, I foolishly left home in search of karaguchi ah-nowakadesu..The ultimate penis. My journey took me to the many streets of LA, many days away from the health club. My hunger for penis became my teacher, and foolishly I let it control the path that I fucked upon. My mouth, sore from sucking, ached as my heart and stomach did, until I came to a realization. My duty was clear. I needed to take a stand and accept my love for the art of vegetarian cuisine AND my love for penis. It was not wrong for me to love both. I love one as a dear friend, and one as a lover. Yes--My mission was clear--I must become a faggot, a secret pervert hired by Sarcasta BUT I MUST ALSO ENJOY THE OCCASIONAL penis.

My adoration for genetalia has placed me within an awkward position. Many faggots refuse to recognize me as their brother. I defend my father's land, but I am looked upon as weak and undisciplined. I tell them, "But, brothers! Listen to my plea! The penises do not weaken me, nor do they make me disobey the rule of my vegeables. They fill me with love." But alas, they do not understand...For the mind of a faggot is complex.

My only earthly desire is to be accepted for who I am. Yes, I am a FAGGOT--But I also enjoy penis. Will you accept me? If you were approached by a faggot who requested a penis, would you submit to his will?

- A Penis-Eatin' Faggot

That's a dirty trick, selling your cheap Apple toys to young kids who don't know any better. Let me guess: you even convinced them that iBooks were computers, right? Those poor, damned youngsters. I don't want to see the looks on their sweet young faces when they go out into the Real World and discover that employers expect people to know how to use Windows.

Why, it ought to be a crime to give Macs to impressionable kids. It's like giving them heroin... both heroin and Macs are overpriced trash used by the dregs of society, degenerates who mask their inadequacies under the guise of artistic personality. Why, I'll show you where heroin and an artistic personality will get you: dead. Just look at Kurt Cobain. Oops, you probably shouldn't have looked at that, he isn't too pretty without a head.

But I digress. The fact is that giving Macintoshes to kids is just wrong. You'll set their technological development back by fuckin' years. I mean, come on... it's a Mac, for Jobs sake. What are these fuckin' jackbooted government thugs trying to do to our children, buying them Macs? I'll tell you what they want. They want these kids in on the Cult. You know, the Crapintrash True Believers. Those loonies refuse to use real computers, all blabberin' on about the sanctity of Jobs' user interface -- but they can't seem to find jobs, get it? They're all useless bums and criminals. I don't know why we taxpayers should fund the next generation of dirty Mac users, suckin' welfare off the government teat while moaning about FireWire and AltiVec. I mean, come on.

I don't have anything against givin' kids toys, and a Mac is a fine toy for a little girl, or a boy whom you suspect of being queer. But tellin' these kids that these toys are computers? Why, that's an abomination! I suppose next you'll be tellin' them that Power Wheels are just the same as real automobiles, and we'll have kids gettin' run over on the highway! Tell me, people, do you want your children being run over on the highway of life?

A Mac is a fine toy, see, but I recommend buying your young ones GameCubes instead. Both Macs and GameCubes are multicolored plastic toys designed for the underdeveloped mind, but at least a GameCube doesn't have all the fuckin' stigma of a Mac. You want your kids being part of the weak leftist politicians, subversive wannabe artists, and child molesters that make up the Apple community? Fine. But don't spend my tax dollars doing it, you fucking communists.

I don't expect much sympathy from you Linux folks. You're just as much wannabe-commies and hypocritical Windows-bashers as the Mac crowd, but you can't even afford decent hardware. I intend to prove that each and every one of you is a terrorist, like Anand lal Shimpi. What with all the talk of stealing copyrighted material, violating contractual license agreements, and the like on this sorry excuse for a weblog, I wouldn't be surprised if Osama bin Laden himself is holed up at the Geek Compound. Probably taking advantage of Malda's loose asshole and installing PGP from the Red Hat Power Tools CD, so that he can further injure the American republic. You're going down, Slashdot!

-- The_Messenger

That's a dirty trick, selling your cheap Apple toys to young kids who don't know any better. Let me guess: you even convinced them that iBooks were computers, right? Those poor, damned youngsters. I don't want to see the looks on their sweet young faces when they go out into the Real World and discover that employers expect people to know how to use Windows.

Why, it ought to be a crime to give Macs to impressionable kids. It's like giving them heroin... both heroin and Macs are overpriced trash used by the dregs of society, degenerates who mask their inadequacies under the guise of artistic personality. Why, I'll show you where heroin and an artistic personality will get you: dead. Just look at Kurt Cobain. Oops, you probably shouldn't have looked at that, he isn't too pretty without a head.

But I digress. The fact is that giving Macintoshes to kids is just wrong. You'll set their technological development back by fuckin' years. I mean, come on... it's a Mac, for Jobs sake. What are these fuckin' jackbooted government thugs trying to do to our children, buying them Macs? I'll tell you what they want. They want these kids in on the Cult. You know, the Crapintrash True Believers. Those loonies refuse to use real computers, all blabberin' on about the sanctity of Jobs' user interface -- but they can't seem to find jobs, get it? They're all useless bums and criminals. I don't know why we taxpayers should fund the next generation of dirty Mac users, suckin' welfare off the government teat while moaning about FireWire and AltiVec. I mean, come on.

I don't have anything against givin' kids toys, and a Mac is a fine toy for a little girl, or a boy whom you suspect of being queer. But tellin' these kids that these toys are computers? Why, that's an abomination! I suppose next you'll be tellin' them that Power Wheels are just the same as real automobiles, and we'll have kids gettin' run over on the highway! Tell me, people, do you want your children being run over on the highway of life?

A Mac is a fine toy, see, but I recommend buying your young ones GameCubes instead. Both Macs and GameCubes are multicolored plastic toys designed for the underdeveloped mind, but at least a GameCube doesn't have all the fuckin' stigma of a Mac. You want your kids being part of the weak leftist politicians, subversive wannabe artists, and child molesters that make up the Apple community? Fine. But don't spend my tax dollars doing it, you fucking communists.

I don't expect much sympathy from you Linux folks. You're just as much wannabe-commies and hypocritical Windows-bashers as the Mac crowd, but you can't even afford decent hardware. I intend to prove that each and every one of you is a terrorist, like Anand lal Shimpi. What with all the talk of stealing copyrighted material, violating contractual license agreements, and the like on this sorry excuse for a weblog, I wouldn't be surprised if Osama bin Laden himself is holed up at the Geek Compound. Probably taking advantage of Malda's loose asshole and installing PGP from the Red Hat Power Tools CD, so that he can further injure the American republic. You're going down, Slashdot!

-- The_Messenger

Dear Miguel,

Please go back to Mexico.

Please take your shitty window manager with you, and never come north of the border again.

GNOME is a shameless Windows-ripoff, which proves how lazy you people really are. GNOME is not only nauseating, but it stinks like a sweaty Mexican, and is vaguely Satanic as well. We have much better Unix windowing interfaces already. We have CDE, a testament to All-American corporate strength and solidarity. We have KDE, created by a band of Europeans who celebrate their Aryan pride by killing Jewish babies. We have several NeXTstep clones. We have FVWM, which is pretty lame, but is still better than GNOME. GNOME is poo. It is as much poo as Red Hat, and Red Hat is some real poo. GNOME is a slow, ugly, poorly-programmed Mexican RAM-hog. And poo.

I know that you designed GNOME with the intention of using it to subvert American intelligence and innovation. I have decyphered the clever Mexian encryption used in GNOME's name to discover its true meaning: Go North Of MExico. Yes, you sent GNOME to the rich north in order to weaken the free Unix movement, and you have succeeded. But now that your plot is discovered, you will skulk back to your filthy third-world country in shame. Ha ha!

So please go back to your magical burrito country and have a tequila and pass out drunk underneath a mule. A farting mule. A farting mule, who despite his farts which stink like month-dead roadkill, is not as offensive as your terrible window manager. Go back to Mexico, and receive training in a more traditional Mexican occupation, such as "hotel clean-up lady" or "criminal". Dance the wicked flamenco and then have a siesta!

Thank you. Or, as you would say, gracias!

Hasta la vista,
The_Messenger

This Generic Slashdot Post was brought to you by The_Messenger

HELSINKI - It has just been learned that any Linux box with an unset "root" password in vulnerable to remote compromise, says Dick Johnson, Linux hacker and security analyst. "The attack is very simple," John reports. "Pretty much all you have to do is log in. Then you have complete control of the system." This security problem is believed to be caused by a fundamental flaw in the design of the UNIX family of operating systems, which is the model for the Linux kernel, a popular Cheap Software product. Johnson elaborates: "Those UNIX guys just didn't account for administrators who are too stupid to set root passwords."

However, knowledge of this flaw fairly widespread within the Linux community. In fact, the only person known to be unaware of a password-less root account's grave implications is Timothy Gaybone, an "editor" for the popular Cheap Software news website "Slashdot.org." While Timothy is a hardcore Windows 98 user, the recent posting of an article detailing a similar security problem relating to Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 relational database product leads many analysts to believe that he is unaware of Linux's problem as well. DOJ crytoanalyst Harry Blotter guesses that Timothy's "reliance on Windows 98 is probably the root cause of his ignorance. After all, Windows 98 doesn't require login passwords."

There are no reports of websites compromised by this latest Linux vulnerability, although many industry experts suspect that, oddly enough, Slashdot.org may have been breached years ago. "Rob Malda's personal workstation has probably been cracked -- his spell-checkers have been deleted," Dick Johnson explains.

Do you use the middle button to paste URLs to content area? I don't, so I use middle button for gestures and added user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false); to user.css. Also, I modified gestimp.js after installing Optimoz so that the gestures I want to use are easy to make. Just modify those addGesture() calls: for example, addGesture("LRL", "Close Document [1]","closeDoc();"); tells that if I move Left-Right-Left (kind of wipe out) the active window closes. If you want to make some interesting gestures you might want to disable the default action for the middle mouse button over a link. See info about hidden Mozilla prefs.

Oh, and if you make any changes to gestimp.js make sure to back it up or it will be lost after you upgrade Mozilla and/or Optimoz.

Also, if you have a recent Mozilla installation you probably want to open html.css too and remove the support for marquee and blink.

I never had any problems installing Optimoz either. You probably have some problems with the Mozilla installation itself. I installed my copy of Mozilla without root and run it without root. If you installed Mozilla as a root you might need to install addons as a root too and even start Mozilla once as a root.

It is from South Park.

Underpants Gnomes

Here's Waldheims message to other civilizations.

Oh, the irony in hearing Waldheim say "We step out of your solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship"...

Loudly ringing mobile phones in cinemas/theatres deserve to be pelted with jaffas. You can recycle the jaffas already on the floor.

According to a British Insurance company, using cell phones or mobile phones handsfree or not, makes the driver more dangerous than a drunk driver. Now imagine a drunk driver on the phone and you have a killing machine. Terrorism at home.

Other things that are bad for driving are

• conversation with passenger when driver insists on eye contact. At least the passenger can watch the road and scream.
• trying to change a tape or cd while driving,
• having sex while driving
• smoking while driving
• eating or drinking. Nothing like dropping a milkshake in the driver's lap to cause a prang.
• having a large hairy spider crawl out of the air vent (fortunately managed to pull over safely before jumping out of the vehicle and screaming).
• getting a flat tyre while travelling at speed on a bad road
• tailgating a truck when it has a blowout.
• mosquitos in the car. trying to kill the mosquito or blow fly while driving
• small children fighting in the back. For gods sake, mum and dad, pull over.
• driving while really angry. like after getting a speeding ticket.
• driving with a dog in your lap (and its head out the window)
• getting changed for basketball game in driver's seat while passenger steers and changes gears
• swerving around an (imaginary) animal on a narrow winding hill road.
• using a street directory or map while driving.
• thinking that a truck can pull up quick enough to avoid you when you cut infront in your tiny 4 cylinder car
• thinking that a truck coming at you on a narrow country road will pull off the road to let you and your caravan drive down the centre of the road.
• roadside advertising, specifically designed to attract driver's attention to the sign and away from the road.

wireless news article on study of mobile phone users driving reaction times

car accident story

another car accident story

links to more info

Loudly ringing mobile phones in cinemas/theatres deserve to be pelted with jaffas. You can recycle the jaffas already on the floor.

According to a British Insurance company, using cell phones or mobile phones handsfree or not, makes the driver more dangerous than a drunk driver. Now imagine a drunk driver on the phone and you have a killing machine. Terrorism at home.

Other things that are bad for driving are

• conversation with passenger when driver insists on eye contact. At least the passenger can watch the road and scream.
• trying to change a tape or cd while driving,
• having sex while driving
• smoking while driving
• eating or drinking. Nothing like dropping a milkshake in the driver's lap to cause a prang.
• having a large hairy spider crawl out of the air vent (fortunately managed to pull over safely before jumping out of the vehicle and screaming).
• getting a flat tyre while travelling at speed on a bad road
• tailgating a truck when it has a blowout.
• mosquitos in the car. trying to kill the mosquito or blow fly while driving
• small children fighting in the back. For gods sake, mum and dad, pull over.
• driving while really angry. like after getting a speeding ticket.
• driving with a dog in your lap (and its head out the window)
• getting changed for basketball game in driver's seat while passenger steers and changes gears
• swerving around an (imaginary) animal on a narrow winding hill road.
• using a street directory or map while driving.
• thinking that a truck can pull up quick enough to avoid you when you cut infront in your tiny 4 cylinder car
• thinking that a truck coming at you on a narrow country road will pull off the road to let you and your caravan drive down the centre of the road.
• roadside advertising, specifically designed to attract driver's attention to the sign and away from the road.

wireless news article on study of mobile phone users driving reaction times

car accident story

another car accident story

links to more info

When will people get it into their heads! This is a historical site.

Use the correct solution for the problem, people!

Strap packets to the legs of carrier pigeons and get them to transmit the information between the buildings.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

Here is the press release from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's investigation into the legality of Sony's region encoding. Here is Sony's response. Here is more info about the ACCC's stance. And Here's what aussies think of it all.

My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:

Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page

My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:

Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page

My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:

Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page

Such as:

My name is Natalie. I live in St.Petersberg and I am looking for a real relationship with a real man. I signed up with this internet service to meet good western men -- I hope you are really there. [url deleted] Please see and write me here if you like me

It's all me [link deleted] Click Here

I would like invite you to come create a couples or singles profile and join this online community. If you are into alternative lifestyle, or just looking for something kinky in your life come try it out. It now has Video IM working and you do not need a web cam to use it. Check it out you will find what you are looking for.

You can see my profile and photos by going to

www.geocities.com/bdsmkitty2000 [oh what the hell, I'll leave this one in]

and creating a profile it only takes 2 minutes to do this so you can look around.

Oh, it does not cost anything to get on to look. I would not pull one of those on you.. I hate it when someone does that to me.

You can find me under the user ID [deleted] and and see my profile and photos. I am a 34 year old bi Dom fem 34DD 120lb's

Kisses
[deleted]

Actually, there's suprisingly few of these in my spam file these days.

For the same reason artificial intelligence has been held back by reliance on "symbolist" languages such as LISP:

Everyone wants to believe they are smart enough to tell the computer the rules of behavior rather than realizing they should be teaching the computer to think statistically which is to say rationally.

Of course since the primary religion pushed by both government and media is the moral virtue of ignoring statistics (to the point that actuaries are now thought of as reactionaries) there should be no surprise that the high priesthood of "AI" has failed not only to produce artificially intelligent software but has done so through the theological bias of rules as commandments for the faithful computer.

(It's alpha version yet, and it's presently working on a very small subset of environments - requiring MS Outlook/CDO/.NET; but the author seems to solicit invitations to have this rewritten for a normal platform/language:

"Depending on the interest, the future versions can be re-written to support more platforms and features."

Before that, its being free is questionable as it's basing on non-free tech...)

(President Bush's niece was among those students whose privacy was violated).

Maybe she can get C's at Yale too...

Then again, if she knows how to spell Nepotism, she could get something better...

(Sorry! The urge to post a reply was just too overwhelming!)

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

Oh boy, Kent Hovind's alleged prize for proof of evolution. Needless to say, finding evidence of evolution that is convincing enough for this nutcase would be next to impossible. You'd pretty much have to invent a time machine and carry him back millions of years, and then you'd have to convince him your time machine wasn't an elaborate hoax.

On the flip side, some other shmoe could offer a huge prize for "proof" that God created the world in seven days about 6,000 years ago. The prize would be just as unclaimed as Hovind's. Would that make you doubt the Bible? Of course, such a prize is not out there, because real scientists don't attempt to prove their theories by saying "nyah nyah, you can't prove yours."

Here's a link for you: The Wild, Wild World of Kent Hovind.

I think a more interesting question is, if you could built a large metropolis completely from scratch, what should be done for this modern-day Brasilia?

PageRank is not the only criteria for ranking pages.

Funny, but I read an article that was talking about the ranking of pages on Google, not on the PageRank algorithm. You seem a tad fixated, and you seem to be refuting yourself. The guy was talking about "why does Google order results the way it does" (which is a mystery to even self-proclaimed experts as yourself), not "How does this relate to the PageRank algorithm".

That's not empirical evidence; that's two anecdotes and a flawed premise

Empirical: Relying on or derived from observation or experiment.

Sounds like empirical evidence to me: He noticed a preponderance of Geocities sites and became curious as to why they're there.

If you use the Google toolbar to check the mantid search results, you'll actually see lower-PR sites in the results ahead of the page this guy is fixating on. That is empirical evidence that PageRank isn't everything, and that high-ranking results aren't necessarily the highest-PageRank pages, especially for obscurer search terms.

You seem to be arguing with yourself. This whole discussion is about the obscurity of Google's search result ordering, and how people are taking advantage of it (such as in the URL), and here you come coming to save the day and explain how the PageRank algorithm explains it all away. Oh, but wait, no it doesn't...it's only one of the many mysterious machinations at Google...Pick an argument and stick with it.

especially with oddball searches like "ford transmission"

You'd call that an "oddball search"? Jesus you're an apologist. Here's another "oddball" search : siamese kitten: The second link is to a members.aol.com (5 links in the world to it, 1 being the open directory submission) site, and the third is to a geocities.com site. How about Commander Keen: Of the first page (littered with geocities, angelfire, and hometown.aol.com links), #3 is this page. I suppose I should do more normal searches like...Britney Spears?

Hop off your expert soapbox and quit spamming Slashdot with your link : You're just making a fool of yourself.

The steps to flash the firmware can be found here . The basic gist:

1. download the SP-250 firmware and unzip it.
2. Hex-edit the thing so the header will be recognized by the SP-90.
3. Burn it to a mode-1 CD-ROM and boot the SP-90 with that CD.

Nathan

From the news section on their website;

One patient, who was 20 years old when he lost his vision in a WW II mortar explosion, saw good phosphenes 57 years later. One of our earlier patients (1) lost his sight at age five and was implanted at age 68. He never saw anything and this may be related to the fact that he was blinded in childhood before the visual cortex fully developed.

So, the short answer is no. If you were blind at birth you seem to be shafted.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

I would think that any changes the US Government (or its agencies) made to GPL code would have to fall into the Public Domain.

Not so. If the NSA decided to release NSALinux to the public, then sure they would have to release the code as well. However, if they simply continued using it for themselves then there is no requirement for them to release the code to anybody.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

btw its slashdotted, so see a cooler chair here

the cool chair linky thing

Nonsense, I was just trying to spice things up a bit.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

Personally, I think India is just trying to "curry" favour with the more developed nations.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

I realised the other day that I am almost there already. I flipped through the TV guide for a few minutes and found that there was not a single thing on TV that I wanted to watch. It is not that I have unusual tastes. It was just all a complete and utter waste of my time.
Now, I carefully browse the guide, select a show - if possible, and watch only that. Then I get up and leave so that I can do something else.
I came to the shocking realisation that there is not a single movie that I would even be willing to search for on the internet right now as a free download. They simply are not making that many movies worth watching anymore.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

And I think the Mac wins. As big a Linux fan that I am, I could with no qaulms whatsoever recommend a Mac to my sister and tell her to install MS Office herself. Speed of install is probably more relvant to work situations, and that'll mostly be disk images anyway.

Xix.

Salaries and wages are coming down for a long time, something which was planned by the ITAA (financed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) who has been spreading millions around Washington for years. In most professional industries - doctors, lawyers, dentists, whatever, you have skilled workers, who work many hours, but who are still concerned enough about the profession to form the AMA, ADA, ABA and so forth. These "super genius" programmers think that economics doesn't effect them. How many dentists say "I'm the best dentist there is, I don't care about what the HMO's are doing"? These people are displaying a lack of professionalism and calling it professionalism. And they always get modded up high.

Anyhow, these people exist, but the important thing are that people who are more clued in exist. The best thing to do in these dark times where the ITAA is very powerful, and organizations like IEEE are beyond hope are to get into contact with one another (eg. the clued in people talk to one another) and go from there. I think the Programmers Guild is a good organization, and there are some interesting Usenet newsgroups although we probably need one moderated by one of us. Since this directly involves my lifestyle I have put a lot of thought into this, this is not esoteric to me, it is very important as it severely affects my life for years to come. Here is my web page on various IT work things which hopefully will help point people in a positive direction to do something constructive.

If this thing doesn't have a "board", then how about calling it a keytube?

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

For example,

I am a law-abiding citizen, speaking perfect English!

becomes:

eye 4m th3 Gr34t z3r0-k3wL, 3y3 w1ll 0wnxZ0r j00 w1nd0z3 b0x!$##@

I met him freshman year of College. I went to Croatia last year during the summer to hang out with him and his friends. I know a few little phrases, but I'm sure I can't spell them.

Every Croatian I came into contact with spoke english well enough for me to understand. It was funny to hear from my roomate that he had never heard his friends speak in English.

Croatia is full of attractive girls, which is probably why the guys at CMU picked it... Why else pick such an obscure language?

Oh, I have a geocities webpage with pictures from my trip. If the bandwidth doesn't run out, try
www.geocities.com/lukewallace/pictures/europe2001/

Bok.

Didn't you mean Akinude?

The issue is the unbelievable path of one bullet. On it's own, it would be accepted, but other suspicious facts that conflict with the offical theory are enough to make all the coincidences practically impossible.

Whatever you believe about JFK doesn't matter. The fact remains that those rumors that circulate, are most often correct! I know it sounds wrong, but there is ample evidence for it.

World War II for example:

We are told the Hitler was an agressor, but he did everything to make peace with the UK. It was Churchill, who wanted to be a wartime leader, who forced Hitler into war. That also shows that Roosevelt convinced Churchill that the US would enter the war, once the UK did. That alone shows great support for the long-standing rumors (which is a FACT) that FDR not only knew about Pearl Harbor, but provoked Japan to war with the US.

Indeed, all of that I found while trying to find the facts about Sept. 11th. Such as:

Meetings between 9-11 financiers and top intelligence officals

The Bin-Laden Tape was obviously a forgery

The fact the the terrorists could easilly have been disabled by the pilots The article doesn't mention it, but releasing cabin pressure would also have knocked everyone on-board unconscious. It's hard to take over the plane when you have to stay in a seat (where there's an air-mask).

Israeli spies AT LEAST KNEW about the attack plan

Or the Instant message Odigo (an Israel based company with WTC offices) employees recieve 2 hours previous to the attacks. No link since newsbytes shut down... I'm sure you can find the Google cache, or some other, site.

Before I found sites with this type of information, I was basically as trusting as you. Now, I'm convinced that rumors are typically more accurate than the news media, and won't believe a word I'm told, without some actual proof. So, it's not that hard for me to believe that JFK could have been a target of his own government. Hell, it sounds like that's just the case with the Sept 11th attacks.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/9-11/9-11.html

As someone who grew up in the former G.D.R.(German Democratic Republic), I think I am allowed to draw a parallel here: The Berlin Wall (here an excellent link for those of you who wants to polish up there German language capabilities) was originally erected in order to protect East Germany from the West (and to retain the people in the Soviet Occupation Zone). The GDR-offiziell term for this perverse building was "Antifascistic Protective Wall"... wink wink, nudge nudge, know whatahmean, say no more?(see).

The bottom line is: While I am quite tempted to see a European Net as a way to protect us Europeans from the sillyness and corruption of the current US government (no offence to you honest US citizens), I cannot see why the European government(s) should be somehow immune against stupidity and corruption... Ultimately, a European Net would be used to imprison us rather than to protect us from the outside world.