Inaugural Post.

I've been using the name "Priscian" online for various purposes for about ten years now. I adopted the name from the now uncommon phrase "breaking Priscian's head"; that is, smashing the bust of the Roman grammarian, a metaphor for violating the rules of grammar. At the time I was teaching grammar for the English department at SUNY Brumal, and since there are no famous grammarians of English (name one!), I took the name of a Latin one (fl. 500 CE). Unfortunately, my intentions of learning Latin better than the hodgepodge of it I do know became forgotten when ideally imagined life was waylaid by reality. But these are different times, and Latin may see a place in them yet.

Upon flipping through Dante's Inferno last year, I was surprised to find Priscian consorting with the sodomites (i.e. those "violent against nature") in the Seventh Circle, and couldn't imagine why. Such questions are why the Internet exists, and I googled my way to a nicely jesuitical answer in a compelling essay by Arnd Bohm: "Since grammarians should be the ones most aware of the grave implications of linguistic deviation, anyone who tolerated deviations, including the innovations that languages ordinarily generate, could be accused of sodomitical sympathies.… Conversely, Richard Kay has argued that for Dante the grammarians like Priscian violated nature because they did not accept that it was natural for language to change and evolve." There you go, and poor Priscian screwed either way!