ISTI MIRANT STELLA

Now I say it's ISTI MIRANT STELLA.

I thought that's what it should be, but a lot of high-class-looking seemingly authoritative sites by people with all sorts of hoity-toity uptown alphabet salad after their names kept saying STELLAM (accusative), and they intimidated me.

The proof of the pudding should seemingly be in Bayeux Tapestry Panel 15 itself -- solvitur ambulando -- but there is a slight chance that the M is really there, but clumsily buried beneath the embroidered tail of the comet at the upper right-hand corner of Panel 15. A medieval tapestry scholar could see it, but I can't. Medieval tapestry scholars can see big old embroidered letters that I can't. Their many years of scholarship and study, thought, contemplation and expertise gave them X-ray eyes. Of course this theory relies on Mathilde and her Court Embroiderer Ladies to have been clumsy, sloppy, nearsighted, color-blind, and to have had stubby fat fingers, and I find no other complaints about this in the æsthetic reviews of their work.

But to the extent that Miss Murphy banged this whack lingo into my aching head around 1963, I thought it should be STELLA (ablative).

Now this Ph.D. Mechanical Engineer from the University of Houston says it's STELLA, and I say the hell with it. On matters astronomical, historical, cometary, animal and vegetable and mineral, he seems to know Shit ® from Shinola ®, so I suspect he maintains equally high standards in his Latin grammar. This is not the kind of guy who can't see big letters, or sees them when they're not there, or who confuses his ablative first declension singular feminine with his accusative first declension singular feminine.

On his translation we will have to agree to disagree. He says "They marvel at the star." I say "These men gaze at the star." Let's call the whole thing off. Who has a Cassell's?

Naughty English schoolboys, and an American schoolboy of my acquaintance, have been graffitiing this into their Latin textbooks with cheap leaky pens for at least 250 years:

O Latin is a dead tongue
Dead as it can be
First it killed the Romans
And now it's killing me

Miss Murphy liked me because I laughed at her Latin jokes. One day she addressed the class: "All of you will graduate summa cum laude. Except you, Merkin -- you will graduate mirabile visu."

I was indeed graduated from Woodrow Wilson, and indeed mirabile visu.

Oh, and check out the new Vleeptron motto.