A few days ago I wrote:

In case you are wondering how her husband reacted, the original chronicle says

ad virum gaudens reversa

This can either mean, “She returned to her happy man,” or, “She returned to her orgasm.” Those medieval chroniclers, such jolly chaps.

Nick pointed out to me that gaudens is nominative, and therefore refers to Godiva and not her husband. Thus the translation should be, “She returned happily to her husband.” However Google translate is convinced that gaudens means orgasm, and that virum is not worth translating.

Nick had this to say on the subject.

Google Translate is more than capable of googlebombing itself. In fact its entire model of machine translation is essentially a gigantic googlebomb wrapped in a linguistic suicide vest detonated by the unwary remote user: there is no parsing or any kind of natural language modeling, only a statistical corpus search for lexemic matches. This works moderately (i.e., not very) well for languages with English-style rigid word order and low inflectionality, but fails hilariously when confronted with highly inflected languages with scrambling word order, among which Latin is exhibit A, which is why Google can’t tell which noun an adjective agrees with… I suppose the noun gaudium could be translated orgasm at a pinch, though the actual Latin for orgasm is, er , orgasmus (i.e. a straight transliteration of the Greek, since Romans didn’t have orgasms of their own and had to import them by sea, as documented in the first book of Caesar’s Phallic Wars, subtitled Carry On up the Tiber). gaudens is present participle of gaudeo, so hey, on the same page of the dictionary, which is good enough for Google.

I suppose that explains the Latin scholar who when asked to conjugate, declined. Thank you Nick. Your erudition sets my pancreas aquiver.

It’s been raining on and off today, so we dodged one rain shower to get as far as a marina on the outskirts of Rugby where we paused to do laundry. There was a wait for the machine, so we hung out in the tea room and chatted to the owner and one of the other customers, a retired helicopter mechanic for the RAF.

We went through a flight of three locks this afternoon. They were duplicate locks, that is, two narrow locks side by side, so there was no waiting. One of the pairs of upper lock gates has some fragments of poetry on them.

There is more poetry scattered around on locks in three other canals in different parts of the country. Apparently these lock gates were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize in 2012. Ted Hughes is not someone I would choose to name a prize after. So far as I can tell, he was a great poet but a toxic person, so I’m glad the lock gates didn’t actually win.