POEMA ARANEAE

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Vous êtes le bienvenu(e), monsieurdame !  Et pourtant …  To our great confoundment, we are forced to confess, that hitherto  we have had no such offering.  This yawning gap we now hasten to amend, as follows:

Que not’ frère l’araigne

ce tribut ne dédaigne

car il comble un vide:

ce poème arachnoïde

Philological note:

Spiders speak a more classical, even old-fashioned, variety of French, than what you and I learned in class.   Their word for ‘spider’ is the chastely Latinate araigne, from Latin ARANEA (cf. Spanish araña).  The modern bastardization is araignée, which by rights should mean “spiderweb” or maybe “spider-clowder” (though I personally have never witnessed  a clowder of spiders;  they tend to be rather standoffish).

I would also love to report that dédaigne was the subjunctive of an archaic *dédaindre;  but alas, ‘tis not so, it’s dédaigner (from DIGNARI) all the way down.  (Immediately related to our English verb deign, btw, and more distantly to the noun dignity, from the Latin source.)

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Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

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