To delight.

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

Probably just because of what gets taught in schools. You end up getting the impression that a poems are about one of

Being sad

Walking through nature

Being sad whilst walking through nature.

Which is a slightly reductive take on a whole fucking medium.

Anyway, Catullus was less the stereotypical "upper class guy with a lot of education who loves nature and being depressed" sort of poet and is more to the "battle rapper" end of poetry.

He's got multiple poems that are basically diss tracks. This is exactly why Poem 16 (this one) comes straight out the gate with "I AM GOING TO BUTTFUCK AND FACEFUCK YOU" (lowercase letters wouldn't be developed for a few hundred more years, by definition everything Catullus wrote was in ALL UPPERCASE): Catullus is directing this poem at Marcus Furius Bibaculus (Bibaculus to his friends), who had an affair with Juventius: a woman Catullus had a (possibly unrequited) love for. In fact, this sort of reputation is part of what Catullus is saying. He's like "oh, you think I'm some weak pansy faggot because I'm a poet? Let's see how you feel after I shove my huge* manly dick up all your holes, bitch."

Anyway the whole reason I was supposed to be replying is to talk about how Latin is an amazing language to swear in. They've got some very fun words like irrumo, ittumare which means basically "to fuck someone's mouth", but in a single word. Face-fuck is really the best translation English has, and that's two words.

Plus Latin is an infected language! He didn't just say "face fuck", he said the first person singular future active indicative of "face fuck".

Irrumabo is a single word that packs all this info into its infected form. It's not just "what" (face fucking), it's who and when and how.

Who: me, singular. "We" are not going to face fuck you, I, personally, and going to face fuck you.

When: in the future. This is a thing that's going to happen. Latin has multiple moods for this, the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive.

He doesn't use the subjunctive, which'd mean "I hope I facefuck you: it'd be great if someday I get to face fuck you".

He doesn't use the imperative, which is for stating commands. He's not saying "get facefucked, idiot".

He uses the indicative. This is for stating facts. He's saying this as just a thing that will happen. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow... I will facefuck you.

It's also active not passive, which means it's not "you will be facefucked by me". It's active, meaning it's "I am going to facefuck you".

The word is also derived from the word for teats? As in, it meant something like suckling?

Catullus is saying you're going to suck his cock like a baby feeding from their mother, and he's going to make you do this. This is just a thing that is going to happen.

And he says that all in ONE SINGLE WORD.

Latin is a lovely language for this sort of thing.

(there's also a lot of fascinating stuff about the second line of the poem: he calls Aurelius as pathicus, and Furius a cinaedus. These mean slightly different things! Translating them as "cocksucker" and "butt boy" is definitely one way to do it, but there's more to say about this, but this post is already way too long)

Anyway, while "first poet to ever get his bone on" is highly inaccurate (Sappho was centuries earlier! You think a woman who was so gay she gave us two of our words for WLW didn't BONE?), he definitely was one of the poets who most noticeably Absolutely Fucked and he made sure you knew it.

Correction: Juventius was a Local Twink that Catullus had the hots for and who definitely snubbed him and flounced off with someone else. Catullus' on-again-off-again girlfriend was Lesbia. Scholars disagree about which poem Furius and Aurelius teased him about that made him write Poem 16 -- could have been either 5 (about Lesbia) or 48 (about Juventius).