Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,<\/span><\/p>\n I spotted your post<\/a> today, and wondered about the gender of \u2018dies\u2019. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be \u2018nullus dies\u2019, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus \/ no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus \/ one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc. <\/span><\/p>\n But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes \u2018It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb<\/em>\u2019. Note that this is not about writing, but painting! <\/span><\/p>\n Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. \u2018Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.\u2019 \u2018Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.\u2019 So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (\u2018Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea\u2019,Rheinisches Museum<\/em> 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written \u2018nullus dies sine linea\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon." He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here<\/a>, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea<\/em> formulation.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea? I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written … Continue reading “Nulla Dies Sine Linea<\/i>: Bad Medieval Latin?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,40,316],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin","category-literary-matters","category-maxims-mottoes-epitaphs-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
<\/a>Very interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.<\/span><\/p>\n