Kevin's Classics

"Finally, all my endeavours to become a funny guy shall not have been in vain for I have found the advice, the theory, that will help me to realise my potential."   Or so, I thought when I started to read Cicero's De Oratore about jokes [2.217-252]. However, in the very first line, Cicero's character Caesar exhibits that there's no particular theory or methodology behind being comical: “however, those who have tried to come up and teach some theory or methodology on this subject (i.e. humour), exhibited themselves so unwitty that you cannot laugh at anything else of them but their failure at being funny .” ( Sed qui eius rei rationem quandum conati sunt artemque tradere, sic insulsi exstiterunt ut nihil aliud eorum nisi ipsa insulsitas rideatur. )

Classicists being classicists: or are we changing? Note beforehand: this post should have been a short anecdote about my fondness for nitpicking, grammatical questions but it turned into a rant about new teaching methods. If you don't get the coherence, it's not your fault: I don't get it either.

Excuses Neglect: 1. to give little attention or respect to | 2. to leave undone or unattended to especially through carelessness Origin and etymology of neglect: Latin neglectus , past participle of neglegere, neclegere , from nec- not (akin to ne- not) + legere" to gather Neglegere (other variations negligere, neclegere ): 1. not trouble one's self about | 2. to disregard, dispise| I think you get the gist of what I am trying to say with all these definitions (English from Merriam-Webster dictionary, Latin from Lewis & Short). To put it in words, I have been neglecting this blog for quite some time now. Finally, I managed to write these words down on paper (uh, on the server; the rest of this post contains "writing" for "typing words into MS Word"). Acceptance is the first step to recovery, right? Nevertheless, I am still not off the hook and I should explain why I disappeared after the very beginning of this blog

Hello everybody ( you who dared to come to this blog), If you found this blog somehow by googling, then I applause you for finding it in the first place and for wanting to read a blog about classics by a student. Perhaps you're the unfortunate person who discovered me by searching for "mosquito killer" with the hope that you could find a way to get rid of them? In that case, I have to apologize beforehand because this string is just a random tag I put in.  (Not to say that I am not a phenomenal bug smasher since I have already splashed two gnats, only the third one is still lurking in my room). But let's get to the point, shall we? I am a classics student named Kevin van der Hoek and I have recently attained my bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin language and culture. Hereafter, I am going to carry on with the research Master's in Literary Studies. As you might guess from my name, I am not from the UK or the USA, but from the Netherlands. This has all to ...