Mumpsimus

Mumpsimus is a joking expression widespread in classical philology that is used to criticize a grotesquely conservative approach to traditional texts or, in a broader sense, a thoughtless, traditional insistence on traditional customs.

The word goes back to an anecdote that is apparently first documented in De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (“On the value of education”) by the English humanist Richard Pace (first printed in 1517): A monk had during the celebration of Holy Mass after the Communion according to his missal always read quod ore mumpsimus, domine, pura mente capiamus . To the fact that there was no word “mumpsimus” and that there was an error in his copy which had to be corrected to quod ore sumpsimus (“what we received with the mouth”), he replied: He had read and read like this all his life will not exchange his “mumpsimus” for this newfangled “sumpsimus”, whatever the Latin language and the meaning required.

The word and, implicitly, the anecdote associated with it can already be found in a letter from Erasmus to Henry Bulloch from 1516. It spread in classical philology because Richard Bentley used it in a famous treatise. Since Bentley was raised as a model by German philologists in the nineteenth century, the word has often been found in German-language ancient philological treatises, more often in polemical occasional writings and in learned correspondence, for example with Friedrich August Wolf , Wilamowitz and his students. In classical philology is called an extreme insistence on the traditional text with statements like "his old mumpsimus it reads" that resists being corrupt passages by conjecture to emended even if the necessary improvement is obvious.

In English , the word is also used beyond the narrow field of philology to denote people who, due to their insistence on traditional views or customs, are not accessible to rational instruction.

literature

• DR Shackleton Bailey : mumpsimus - sumpsimus. In: Ciceroniana. ns 1, 1973, pp. 3-9.
• DR Shackleton Bailey: mumpsimus redivivus. In: Philologus. 121, 1977, pp. 241-243.

proof

1. ↑ Richardus Paceus, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur liber , Froben, Basileae 1517, p. 80b: "Quidam indoctus Sacrificus Anglus per annos triginta Mumpsimus legere solitus est loco" Sumpsimus "; & quum moneretur à docto ut errorem emendaret, respondit, Se nolle mutare suum antiquum Mumpsimus ipsius novo Sumpsimus ."
2. ↑ Erasmus, Ep. 456,68-72 Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami , denuo recognitum et auctum per PS Allen. T. 2., E typographeo Clarendoni, Oxonii 1910, p. 522.
3. ^ Richard Bentley, Dissertation Upon the Letters of Phalaris . In: The Works of Richard Bentley . Collected and edited by Alexander Dyce. Vol. 1, Francis Macpherson, London 1836, pp. Xlviii.
4. ^ Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, p. 173.
5. ^ Friedrich August Wolf, Miscellanea , in: Friedrich August Wolf, Small writings in Latin and German . Vol. 1: Scripta latina. Bookshop of the orphanage, Halle 1869, p. 497.
6. ^ Paul Friedländer to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, November 26, 1916, in: "The Wilamowitz in me". 100 Letters between Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Paul Friedländer (1904-1931) . Edited by William M. Calder III and Bernhard Huss. University of California, Los Angeles 1999, p. 103.
7. ↑ Webster's Online Dictionary, sv mumpsimus  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , The Mavens' Word of the Day, May 23, 2001: Mumpsimus .