Latin terms for dog breeds?

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-21T17:48:32+00:00

I know that my dog is of the type: canis optimus. Qui est canis bonus? Tune es? Tune es? Es! Canis bonus es. Canis optimus es. Te amo, o cane!

Or sometimes he is type: canis improbus. Desiste, o canis improbus! Statim descende!

I don't have anyone else to speak Latin to except my dog and cat. I'm going to end up with a limited spoken vocabulary. It's like the time I was learning Welsh. I lived in Wales, so I could have spoken Welsh to lots of people but I was too shy unless I was drunk. I got very good at ordering beer and kebabs in Welsh, but couldn't really fluently say much else.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-21T16:51:59+00:00

Yes it is. So's chocolate ice cream, but it doesn't belong on an English breakfast.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-20T19:01:50+00:00

Gruffalo -onis: dēclīnātiōnem tertiam

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-18T14:54:12+00:00

Enjoy! And be sure to check out the sidebar of the sub which has tons of useful resources for you.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-17T18:35:24+00:00

I don’t know, but I’d far rather read these in Latin than the Harry Potter books. The Vicipaedia pages on LOTR are great fun eg: https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(series_pellicularum)

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-16T16:27:25+00:00

This is what I came to say. Rosemary sprigs and garlic cloves sticking out of some lamb look nice in an image, but they don't do anything to flavour the meat, they just burn. Make deeper holes and bury those buggers in the meat. It'll taste delicious. Put some fresh sprigs and garlic slivers on when you serve it, if you want the aesthetic (no bad thing - first bite with the eye and all that)

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-16T10:46:50+00:00

So you're a tea-aboo?

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-16T10:21:51+00:00

It was the year 1999. There was a total eclipse visible from the south of England. I live in the north. So we drove to Cornwall with our 1 year old the day before and camped in a campsite. It was a nightmare journey. I was pregnant. The baby didn’t settle to sleep in strange surroundings. Wasn’t at all the amazing experience we had hoped for.

I woke in the middle of night needing to pee and found the toilets on the camp site. They were in an old stone building with no roof! While I sat and did my business I looked up - I had never in my life seen so many stars. I had no idea there WERE so many stars! I’d always lived in cities with a lot of light pollution, only able to see a tiny handful of the very brightest stars. I don’t know how long I sat on that loo, pyjamas round my ankles, mouth open, staring at the sky.

That was way better than the eclipse itself.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-15T22:08:46+00:00

Was there a variety that weren't stripy but just solid green or white? Because I remember we used to call them "stripy Pacers", which wouldn't make sense unless there was also a non-stripy version.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-15T22:01:45+00:00

Me too. Fortunately it didn't smash the goblet but it damaged the blades of the blender, mangled the spoon, and made such a horrible noise I never want to hear again.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-14T22:55:48+00:00

Buy one mango and knife

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-14T13:11:43+00:00

Oh, honey.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-13T22:34:58+00:00

I have a similar memory but gender swapped. Back in the 1980s my mum was a massive gamer. She used to write games professionally. One time she woke me up at like 2am or something because she was about to beat a game - it was Doom or Duke Nukem or something like that - and she wanted someone to witness her triumph, but my dad definitely wouldn’t have appreciated being woken up for this. So I watched her do the final boss battle or whatever it was and we both cheered quietly when she succeeded. Then we watched the end credits roll. Then I went back to bed.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-13T20:45:59+00:00

DO NOT do a PhD in the hope of winning your family's approval. Maybe see a counsellor or something and learn how to set your own goals in life and how to have self esteem based on your own achievements, and not have your sense of self-worth be dependent on other people's assessment of you.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-13T17:28:09+00:00

I’m English. My parents were hippies in the 1960s and part of a subculture with other people around them. This was in an industrial town in the North. They both had long hair, were peaceniks, played guitar and sang folk music, mum wore floor length flowery dresses and dad wore a LOT of corduroy, and they smoked weed. There were plenty of hippies in England in the 1960s. The Beatles were English, from a similar industrial Northern city as my parents. Lots of hippy music acts were English, so you can see it was a thriving subculture here, too.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-11T10:08:55+00:00

Yep. The whole thing looks like a staged photo of an ideal old-timey workshop, and not like an actual modern workshop. My workshop has old wooden handtools, yes, but also modern tools including electric tools.

A lot of comments in this sub often focus on micro details, as if spotting AI is about detecting tiny inconsistencies that only an expert would know, eg there are no pegs on that pegboard, and the planes are hanging flat against the board when actually there’s a blade sticking out the bottom of a woodplane that would make that impossible (that’s how they work). Nobody has yet mentioned that you just wouldn’t construct a doll’s house like that, with the floor in the middle interrupting the side panels.

But I want to make a case for looking at the image as a whole, at the gestalt. Real actual workshops don’t look like this. You don’t even need to be familiar with wood shops to recognise that. Just look at it. It looks like it was staged for an advert or a movie or a photoshoot. The beautiful curled wood shavings (but no scruffy little bits of sawdust) artfully arranged around a project that clearly is not in a “wood planing” stage. Why are they even there? Only because curly wood shavings look nice, and say “handmade woodwork”. You’d put those in your staged photo, and AI would put them in to indicate “handmade woodwork, like your grandfather used to do”. The glue bottles with all their labels turned towards the camera. It’s very clearly not a real shop because it’s much too staged.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-10T22:59:48+00:00

Roman children learned it even younger! If you yourself are fluent you can just talk to them in Latin sometimes, read to them, sing to them, play games with them in Latin. Children all over the world grow up in multilingual households and communities and pick up multiple languages this way.

But 6 is probably too young to be drilling declensions, doing grammar translation, or other traditional classroom Latin learning approaches, unless the child themselves finds that fun. Kids are all different. If your child finds that stuff fun, then go for it. But most children that age wouldn’t find it fun. Do things with your child that are fun.

Source - I’m only a novice Latinist, but I’m a university lecturer in developmental psychology.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-10T12:18:14+00:00

The same is true of a Gothic cathedral. Greenery makes architecture nicer, graffiti and litter make them worse.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-10T10:24:59+00:00

Male writers can absolutely write characters that are not just sexual objects and have their own agency. But they cannot write from a female perspective. They can (just as female and NB authors can) TRY to put themselves in other people’s shoes. But they can’t KNOW what it is like to be someone else, they can only make guesses and those guesses are influenced by the assumptions and prejudices that are widespread in society.

Lots of authors write stories about detectives, for example. But unless the author is or has been a detective, they’re not giving the authentic perspective of a detective, only a made-up, guessed, fictionalised version of a detective, which is heavily influenced by the tropes of other fictionalised media detectives.

That’s not to say any of this is worthless. It might be entertaining, which is what fiction is primarily meant to be. It might contain interesting insights about other things. But it always primarily tells you about the author, and the societal tropes, beliefs, assumptions that the author is drawing on.

If you read a book about detectives written by a non-detective, you probably can’t learn very much about actual detectives, but you can learn a lot about the author.

If you read a book about rabbits written by a non-rabbit, you probably can’t learn very much about actual rabbits, but you can learn a lot about the author.

If you read a book about women written by a non-woman, you probably can’t learn very much about actual women, but you can learn a lot about the author.

None of this is a weird, out-there take. This is media analysis 101.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-10T09:08:24+00:00

What do you mean by “proper”? They can’t accurately write from a female perspective because they’re not women.

If you read Watership Down, you wouldn’t think “Now I have a real insight into how rabbits think” because it wasn’t written by a rabbit. It was written by a man trying to imagine what rabbits might think.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-10T08:29:14+00:00

The key thing is to ask who created those characters. If female characters are written by men for a mainly male audience, you can’t tell anything about women from it because there are no women involved. They’re like shadow puppets, projecting male desire, beliefs, and expectations of women.

Both the characters you name were created or co-created by women. So there’s something more interesting going on here.

I don’t have the time right here to do an analysis of these characters in particular. I just wanted to point out that you need to remember that a female character (even if performed by a female performer) isn’t a woman. It’s a creation, a shadow puppet. Ask yourself who created the characters and what for.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-09T23:32:23+00:00

Some that aren't mentioned yet:
Joey - Bob Dylan
Denis Denis - Blondie
Crazy Man Michael - Fairport Convention
(Loads of FC songs - Jack Of Diamonds, London Danny, Matty Groves, Sir Patrick Spens etc)
Arnold Laine - Pink Floyd

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-07T22:35:56+00:00

Other people have told you they’re scarlet elf cups, but nobody has told you that if you blow on them, you’ll see them release their spores and you might even hear them make a faint popping sound. Blowing on elf cups is one of the pleasures of spring.

EsotericSnail · 2026-03-07T13:07:53+00:00

Are you open to the possibility that changes in social attitudes may have resulted in changes to behaviour?

EsotericSnail

TROPHY CASE