Those who have been reading my articles for a while may recall that I published an article on 16 May 2020 titled “Sean Hannity Does Not Know Latin” in which I extensively made fun of Sean Hannity’s book Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, for the fact that the pre-released cover image had the thoroughly garbled and unintelligible Latin motto “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae” emblazoned across the bottom.
In my article, I noted that it was evident that whoever came up with that motto had simply typed the phrase “Live free or America dies” into Google Translate and slapped the garbled nonsense that spewed out straight onto the front cover of the book. (Apparently no one told them that Google Translate is absolutely terrible when it comes to dead languages.)
Now, as it happens, the very book whose Latin motto I criticized is set to be released in two days. Curiously, the unintelligible Latin word salad has vanished from the front cover and been replaced with the grammatically correct motto “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat,” which neatly translates into English to mean, “Let us live free so that America will not die.” This makes me wonder: Did someone at Threshold Editions read my blog post and realize they needed to fix the bad Latin?
There is no conclusive evidence that the change of the Latin motto on the front cover of Hannity’s book had anything to do with my article on the subject. Certainly, I am far from the only one who made fun of how bad it was. For instance, the folks over at r/latin and on latin.stackexchange.com also had some fun with it. So did Lantern Jack, Maxwell T. Paule, and the Pinkerton Academy Classical Society on Twitter. There are probably also people who quietly sent in emails to the publisher pointing out the egregious errata.
Nonetheless, I was one of the earliest and most vocal critics and my article seems to have gotten by far the most attention. If you search for the phrase “Sean Hannity Latin” in Google, the first thing that comes up is my article and the third thing that comes up is a share of my article by the Indiana University Bloomington Department of Classical Studies.
If you check Google Images, the first and third images that come up are from my article.
Since there’s no way to know for certain how Hannity’s publishers became aware that their Latin motto made no sense in actual Latin, I’m going to choose to pretend that someone there must have read my article. If this is what really happened, though, this means that I have the ability to influence Sean Hannity merely through the words I write!
This gives me tremendous power, since, according to this Forbes article from a couple months ago, at that time, Hannity had “an average total audience of 4.8 million viewers,” making it “the most-watched show in all of basic cable.” Moreover, Hannity also wields tremendous influence over President Donald Trump, who, as we all know, is the current head of the United States executive branch.
Whatever shall I do with this great and terrible power that has fallen upon me? Well, I suppose I’ll start with this:
Sean Hannity, if you’re reading this, I want you to go on your show and publicly admit that you’ve done nothing on air for the past eleven years but peddle lies, nonsense, and conspiracy theories. Then, I want you to disavow white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia, acknowledge the reality and seriousness of climate change, and tell all your viewers to take COVID-19 seriously and wear masks in public at all times. Finally, I want you to quit your job at Fox News with the condition that Fox must fill your primetime slot with a real news segment featuring a real journalist like Chris Wallace or someone else who does actual reporting.
There. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Now, I’ll just have to get the idiots on Ancient Aliens to do the same thing…
(ADDENDUM 8/5/2020: To my great astonishment, this article has now been quoted in The Guardian. Please be aware that this article is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and should not be taken too seriously.)
I wish we could stop calling people we don’t agree with “white supremacists”. Unless you have a direct quote of Hannity saying that whites are the superior race, I don’t think that label is justified. I agree that he’s not the type of person who should be regarded as an authority on the news, but a white supremacist? Not convinced.
Now watch this space for how the newfound power goes right into Spencer’s head and we have yeat another supervillain to deal with!
Right, because you are the only person in the world who knows Latin.
This article is supposed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. As I specifically point out in the article, there are tons of other people who made fun of Sean Hannity’s Latin motto and there’s currently no reason to suspect that anyone at Threshold Editions has ever even heard of my article’s existence. Nonetheless, it is fun to pretend that maybe someone there has.
Hannity’s idiotic publishers certainly don’t.
Way to go! I will choose to give you the credit. 🙂
Thanks! I appreciate it.
A friendly Hello from Austria!
I just laughed soo hard (stumbled upon your article via the Guardian) and just wanted to make you aware of another “classical Latin motto”.
I work in a Spa Resort, and the marketing people of numerous Spa hotels really think that SPA means “Sanus per Aquam” (or as they translate it: health through water) … how did you call it? Garbled gobbledygook? 🙂 My old Latin teacher is rotating in his grave.
Not as brilliant as your Hannity story, but still worth a chuckle.
Have a great day and enjoy your studies!
PS please excuse my English, I am not a native speaker.
I am still genuinely astonished that my article actually got quoted in The Guardian. I joked on Twitter earlier today, “I have now officially made international headlines for… knowing a little bit of basic Latin.”
I suppose my comment will not show, as I closed my WP website and blog quite some time ago.
As a translator (with Latin as my first foreign language and Old Greek the second), I can’t imagine how monolingual Americans might be able to follow your grammatical explanations. There’s an anecdote about Winston Churchill who lost his temper when expected to learn Latin at school. He saw no necessity to decline *mensa* in Latin, the vocative (o mensa!) in particular. He argued it never occurred to him to talk to a table. Which makes me wonder if Boris Johnson actually enjoys ‘table-talks’ now and then, showing off with his alleged profound knowlegde of the lingo.
Back to the Google Translator. It’s the human translators’ worst enemy more often than not. If only monolinguals knew!
As for foreign language mistakes and misspellings in books – they are very common. I even noticed a lot of wrong word derivations (from Latin and Old Greek) in Wikipedia and started to correct them, but decided to give up. Mundus vult decipi, as the saying goes.