Sunday, October 31, 2010

Labor improdus omnia vincit


This is the motto of Fond de l'étang - a boarding school for wayward boys in post-WWII France and the setting for Les Choristes, a 2004 French film directed by Christophe Barratier. A couple years ago I bought a DVD to watch with my French classes on the recommendation of my son who had spent a year in France a decade ago as a foreign exchange student. The motto - in large capital letters - appears one time in the film on a wall in a hall of the building as the new master is introduced to the place. Beneath the Latin and at the right is the ascription "Vergile".

Why is this motto so laughably mistaken? Vergil says in his Georgics I.145-6:
. . . labor omnia uicit 145

improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.
A troublesome sentence to comprehend although not terribly difficult in vocabulary and syntax.

At the Erreurs de Films page on this movie appears this comment by "Michel B":
La devise du 'fond de l'étang', apparaît à un certain moment : 'labor improdus omnia vincit' ne signifie rien en latin. Il faut lire 'improbus' et non 'improdus' (Barbarisme).
Possibly the error is intentional. The phrase in the motto has been around a good while. It produces at least 250 hits on Google (mostly European), among which appear glosses like this: Un travail opiniâtre vient à bout de tout. E.g. from the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing:
Officer's Cross "Labor Improdus Omnia Vincit" for scientific achievements of the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing, awarded at the 57th World Exhibition on Innovation, Research and New Technologies INNOVA 2008
It seems to have been adopted as a tag-line by somebody going under the name "Gael" in a French listserv of some sort called Forum des Coquillards de Villon. You can see a representative post here. Of course, a goodly number - perhaps most - of the postings since 2004 may be parroting this film, wittingly or not, though it seems doubtful that the Officer's Cross thing derives from the movie, or at least from this version of the movie.

By contrast, the less incorrect "Labor improbus omnia vincit" produces some 18,000 hits on Google, and the shorter version (omitting the problematic attributive adjective) "Labor omnia vincit" some 67,000.

Perhaps the director or possibly the screenwriters (Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval, who were adapting the 1947 film La Cage aux Rossignols) have included this bit as a subtle - or not so subtle - comment on the pretensions of this internat de rééducation réservé aux enfants en difficulté. Throughout the film representatives of the school's administration confidently babble in (then) current psycho-socio-educational buzz-words, but they cannot even get a simple Latin quotation right on their proudly displayed motto. Rather, with a complete lack of genuine discernment, they latch onto some debased Latinate hard-work-is-good-for-you proverb floating around here or there and paste it up where it will impress the hoi polloi.

Perhaps it even goes further with a gentle but telling cut at the growing shallowness of a society coming adrift from its cultural roots. After all, nobody in the film comments on the error, or even appears to notice it. Nobody's education has included enough time with one of the preeminent writers of antiquity to recognize a misquote prominently displayed on the wall.

On the other hand, this may have appeared in the earlier film and simply been copied. In that case, we are back to wondering the same things about those involved in that earlier production.

Or is the real answer, as "Michel B" suggests, that these film people (whether in the later or the earlier or both versions of the story) just wanted a Latin motto saying something about the value of work and were too hasty and too cheap to get it right.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Attendance, participation, cooperation and effort are the grade criteria applied by one physical education teacher (with thirty years or more of experience) at my school. I'm not sure why I asked him. He doesn't have a classroom this year, so I see him regularly in the science wing's utility room where there is a coffee-maker for the third floor. He was there working on grade entry work on his laptop when I stopped by for a re-fill one afternoon. I've been wondering a lot about grades the last few years, so I just inquired.

I suppose this set of criteria results in fairness. Students with little or no athletic ability (regardless of their motivation) and students with little or no ambition to reach a high level of accomplishment (regardless of their natural talent) can earn an A by attending, participating, cooperating and making an effort. The level of actual achievement in athletic pursuits, whether individual or group, indoors or outdoors, high-intensity or low-intensity, over the semester or academic year or even all four years of high school is irrelevant under this criteria. This may entail a dilution of the accomplishment of those who actually have a lot of ability or ambition or both, and consequently come to perform at a level of excellence, but who cares? By necessary implication that group of students will have attended, participated, cooperated and made an effort, so they will have their As too.

In my school an A for a semester of phys ed counts the same weight on the cumulative grade point average as an A for a semester in Latin. I can't help thinking that learning enough Latin vocabulary, morphology and syntax, and practicing thinking with all that Latin vocabulary, morphology and syntax well enough, to get As on my tests, quizzes and projects is necessary for a student to get an A in Latin. No doubt there is some correlation between this attitude of mine and the fact that there are three students in the third and fourth years of study in Latin out of a high school population of 600.

Statistic (from CDC): From 1980 through 2008, "the prevalence of obesity among adolescents aged 12 to 19 years increased from 5.0% to 18.1%" Is the appropriate reaction? (1) What the hell lousy kind of phys ed programs are schools running! (2) Without a phys ed course requirement this would be even worse. (3) Both?

Does anybody besides me wonder whether there is any causal relationship between the increasing number of fat kids and giving teenagers As in Gym if they show up, take part, get along nicely and give the impression of trying?

At least gym teachers are fortunate the bureaucrats in charge of such things as NCLB and PSSA haven't figured out how to hold schools responsible for making Olympic contenders out of whatever percentage of teenagers can fairly be described as porkers, weaklings, wimps or klutzes.