Punning Latin mottoes

When General Charles Napier captured the Pakistani province of Sindh in 1843, he is alleged to have reported his success to the Governor General with a punning one-word telegram in Latin: peccavi ('I have sinned/Sindh'). He knew that the message would be understood by the recipient: this was in an era, of course, when a greater proportion of the population enjoyed the benefits of a classical education than is the case nowadays.

This, and a recent visit to St Edmund's School, Canterbury, got me thinking about punning Latin mottoes.

The Tesco Connection

Some years ago I was contacted by the customer relations people at Tesco. A customer had, like me, noticed the motto mercatores coenascent on the doors of their internet delivery vans and wondered what it meant. Tesco did not know the meaning of their own motto, but a Google trawl came up with only two hits, one of them being the website I had at the time.

The coenascent will immediately strike latinists as not quite right (it's clearly a deponent verb, and the -ent ending is impossible), and a quick look at The Oxford Latin Dictionary will confirm that it does not exist. If the motto meant anything, it would be along the lines of 'merchants will grow together.' However, the illatinate nature of the verb makes sense to those who know that the founder of the firm was Jack Cohen, and that the first four letters of the Latin are a pun on his name. Jack came up with the word Tesco by combining the initials of tea importer T. E. Stockwell with the first two letters of his own name. I pointed this out to the customer relations people at Tesco and was thanked with a very generous voucher for my efforts.

Canterbury Tales

And so to Canterbury, where I recently spent an enjoyable day visiting the Classics Department of St Edmund's Junior School. There the respected Tom Hooley runs a great one-man department, combining traditional standards with innovation: for example, I found myself playing Nick to his Sir Alan in a classroom re-enactment of The Apprentice, the task for the two project managers and their teams being to master the Greek alphabet - the kids lapped it up. It was Tom who explained to me the background of the St Edmund's motto.

Most mottoes have noble, aspirational sentiments, or embody eternal truths: Onwards and Upwards, Work Conquers All, Courage in Adversity - you know the sort of thing. Well, the St Edmund's motto translates as 'May I enjoy the function of the whetstone' (fungar vice cotis). What is that all about?

Well, St Edmund's was founded in Yorkshire in 1749 as the Clergy Orphan Society - COS. Sharp-eyed latinists will know that cos (genitive singular cotis) is the perfectly classical word for a whetstone. QED. It's an interesting pun, and if any readers of this blog know of anything similar I'd be delighted to hear about it.