Voided

[randy_byers]

There's a Buddhist temple in our neighborhood called Nalanda West. I can't look at it without thinking delenda est, as in Carthago delenda est. Hm, I always thought it meant "Carthage has been destroyed," but Wikipedia tells me it actually means "Carthage must be destroyed." Even better! Because what I got to thinking as I passed by the temple today is whether something Zen might be gleaned from my free association. I always thought "delenda" must at root mean something like "deleted" or "erased" or "made void." I'm sure the conjugation is wrong, but could we imagine a Roman Buddhist temple named Ego Delenda Est?

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Using my Latin qualifications (which I got from Google a minute ago), it's from the infinitive delere, "to destroy", and is someting called the Future Passive Periphrastic, which is used when you want to say "somebody ought to do something".

So delenda means "[ought] to be destroyed", propaganda means "to be spread around" (compare "propagate"), corrigenda means "to be corrected", and agenda means "to be acted on".

IJWTS "Future Passive Periphrastic" ought to be set to the tune of a certain Mary Poppins number, but Latin geeks have probably already done it.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

I thot periphrastic was a kind of volcanic flow... at least it rhymes. Pyroclastic, periphrastic, let's call the whole thing off.