You've found Father McKenzie. But are you really looking for Eleanor Rigby?

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Habeunt Papam

... not Papem, which is incorrect Latin, but would rectify the incongruity of the world's oldest males-only office being grammatically feminine in Latin. [*]

That the "German Shepherd" has taken the name Benedict XVI, after succeeding John Paul, will do nothing to help certain (unnamed) of my friends to tell the Catholic CHurch apart from the Australian Labor Party.

[*] This is because Papa (Pope) is a Latinised/ Italianised form of the Greek Pappas. In Greek, nouns ending in -as are masculine in gender, but in Italian (which has almost no words ending in consonants) this gets trimmed to an -a ending, which is why Andrea Bocelli has the same first name as Andrea Dworkin.

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