wait wait!! Here's the definition from the horses mouth:
jraef:
Last word: My signature line is (questionable) latin for "Snake oil peddlers cannot exist without an ignorant populace". That is because I have seen a lot of this sort of thing start happening with our flourishing internet and I want people to just think before they buy.
It really galls when one of us has spent a bunch of time clearly spelling out our response only to find someone else hit all the high points in a short quickie.
LOL itsmoked, I liked your first translation better than mine! It made no sense, but sounded cool. I just want to know, was the term "wasted" in there meant to be an adjective referring to the mental condition or the social status of the population?
I have since changed my sig. line. I had a number of "latin-a-philes" tell me I was all wet, since I used a direct translation of English in an American phrased coloquialism and that was not really proper for translating, and I would need to consider the phraseology that the Romans would have used in their own times...blah blah blah.
Can't please everyone.
"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
Nikola Tesla
"I just want to know, was the term "wasted" in there meant to be an adjective referring to the mental condition or the social status of the population?"
Hmmm well the skewed definition of "populatio" is [devastation, wasting / population]
which sounds like a government sorta wasting it's population but heck, the general population will waste itself given the opportunity!!
Ever watch Jay Leno's "Street walking" amazing... the people he corners on the street are literally beyond stupid!! Who's the president right now? "umm, well, I, um, daaaahh, I don't know.." <= def: wasted!
pennpoint; You are sure correct there. Every time I type something I go back and check it. Some of the stuff is astonishing. I think I'm wasted sometimes! I have triple typed words, correctly typed words that never came to mind, etc., etc.
I think the the majority of persons who Leno questions are of normal or above normal intellect, but he only puts the ones who seem ignorant on the show, and that many persons pretend to be stupid in order to get on TV.
I have an aquaintance who was stopped by Jay for one of those interviews at Universal Studios one night. He did in fact try to act stupid to get on, but they weren't fooled. They told him that lots of people try that so they are good at detecting it. He stood around and watched for a while, and the majority of people he talked to DID know the correct answers, so that proves your original point about him only showing the goofy ones. But then again, how boring would it be to show a bunch of intellegent people giving the correct answers?
He only saw one girl who had no clue. He saw her clip later the next night on the show, and he thought she was NOT faking it because there was a lot of other stuff he had asked that didn't make it on the air.
"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
Nikola Tesla
I have been outside the reach of internet for a few days so I couldn't try my linguistic skills on jraef's line - and I'm sure glad that I didn't.
Anyhow. Your guess seems to be at least as good as anyone else's. And that is typical of latin. I had a friend that tried studying latin but he returned to mathematics after having found that a text that he thought was about wine-making in old Rome actually was about bringing elephants over the alps.
Many years later, I heard someone say that "latin is the mathematics for those who can't do mathematics" - and that do not bother much about the result, I would like to add.
