{"id":143,"date":"2003-11-24T11:10:06","date_gmt":"2003-11-24T15:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/24\/those-happy-classick-years\/"},"modified":"2003-11-24T11:10:06","modified_gmt":"2003-11-24T15:10:06","slug":"those-happy-classick-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/11\/24\/those-happy-classick-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Happy Classick Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a208'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Latin <i>negotium<\/i>, which means &#8220;business&#8221; and from which we get &#8220;negotiate&#8221;, and which other languages still use to mean bidness (como negocios en espa&ntilde;ol, che!) has a neat etymology.  It&#8217;s simply a negation (i.e. <i>nec<\/i>-ing!) of <i>otium<\/i>, &#8220;leisure&#8221;.  So speakers of Latin seem to have leisure and non-leisure, instead of business and leisure.  There are probably Latin words which directly mean business, I guess, but I can&#8217;t think of any very natural English words which mean non-leisure.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t let the spelling of our &#8220;business&#8221; fool you, it&#8217;s actually &#8220;busyness&#8221;.  We are lame.  We&#8217;ve even started using the natural, beautiful &#8220;otiose&#8221; as though the state of leisure were some sort of pudendum &#8211; using it, I mean, to mean &#8220;indolent; idle; serving no useful purpose; having no excuse for being&#8221;.  That is lame!  Otiose mofos of the world unite!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Latin negotium, which means &#8220;business&#8221; and from which we get &#8220;negotiate&#8221;, and which other languages still use to mean bidness (como negocios en espa&ntilde;ol, che!) has a neat etymology. It&#8217;s simply a negation (i.e. nec-ing!) of otium, &#8220;leisure&#8221;. So speakers of Latin seem to have leisure and non-leisure, instead of business and leisure. There [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}