Re:How to Sign Your Emails
by pavel_lishin on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @03:42PM
(#741947)
Do you actually know Latin, or are you using a translation service?
One of my signatures for the longest time was "Eta erat cuando hic adveni", which I believe means "It was like that when I got here", but I'd really like to get someone to verify that. (Someone who aced some difficult exam - GRE? GMAT? - proudly said they knew Latin, and were pretty stumped.)
I really liked "V/R" or "VR" that the Navy uses, so I decided to go with that. But what about a tag line? A contact card? Some kind of indication of who I was and where I was working?
After some thought, I put together a V-Card with my contact information. Also, just to screw with people, I put a nice little latin quote at the end. I think the first one was "Sona si Latine loqueris"
Or translated, "Honk if you speak Latin"
Nobody spotted it.
Well since I got away with that, I couldn't let the experiment rest, so I changed my latin quote every month or so. I had "Age, catamite - fac mihi hunc diem felicissimum!" -- go ahead punk, make my day. I had "Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure" -- I can't hear you, I have a banana in my ear. One of my favorites was "Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!" -- may faulty logic undermine your entire philosophy! Which, unfortunately, was true for many of my correspondents.
Nobody ever bothered to look this stuff up. I imagine as long as you're not directly insulting to the reader, it's not that big of a deal. (But if you're a bit of a prankster, there's some fun to be had!)