Wow. Looking online *does* help!

Just at the end of last term, we went over the subjective and objective genitive in Latin. Basically (canonical example coming!) if you say "fear of the state", if that's the subjective genitive, you mean the fear the state has, and if it's the objective genitive, you mean the fear the state causes in others (most likely the people). *watches people's eyes glaze over*

Anyway, while I understood the basic difference, I had no idea why anyone would care. In fact, I stronly suspected that this was just invented to drive people (me) crazy, much like the idea of putting indirect questions inside direct questions*. However, I was wrong. I even admit it. While searching for an easy way to explain why "he looked at me with severity" doesn't use the preposition cum, I stumbled upon this site which had a helpful answer for me:


Let's look at two different expressions with possessives in English: (1) the cat's meow, (2), the song's performance. Grammatically, the words cat's and song's are both in the possessive (aka genitive) case, but there's a different kind of relationship each has to the nouns they're governing. In cat's meow, the word meow expresses a kind of action, and the cat is seen as performing the action. In the song's performance, the word performance is also a kind of action, but here the song is seen as receiving the action of performance. So, in cat's meow, the word cat is genitive, but it's also the subject of the action implied in meow: a cat meows. And in the song's performance, the word song is the genitive, but it's also the object of the action implied in performance: a song is performed. So--we're almost done--we call the cat's meow an example of a subjective genitive, and we call the song's performance an example of an objective genitive. Brilliant, eh? In Latin, adventus Caesaris, the arrival of Caesar is a subjective genitive, and timor periculi, the fear of danger is an objective genitive. Are you wondering why you need to know this to study Latin? Good question. Sometimes the difference between a subjective and objective genitive will be important in Latin. For example, if you want to say my fear in Latin, you've got to say the fear of me, right? And that can be either the fear that I have, or the fear that I inspire in others. The first one, because it's a subjective genitive, would be meus timor, where meus is from the possessive adjective meus, -a, -um. The second, because it's an objective genitive, would be timor mei, where mei is the genitive of the 1st person singular pronoun.


Yay! I know why it matters! I can rest happily, no longer haunted by my ignorance! Rejoice!





*_{When I heard that one, I shocked my entire latin class by calling it "the most fucked up thing I've ever heard"}

*groans*

I don't wanna be beating a dead horse here, but... gah... read at your own risk.

( Spoilery for that article )

I could go on, but... no. Rant over.

Oh look. I get to use my cool Xiggymade icon! Yay!

Hey, you all remember that AFA poll, right?

Very biased thing, all over LJ for a couple of weeks, went from 97% against gay marriage to about 30% in just a few days?

Here we go!

They aren't very bright, though, if they think it was done because of "gay activist groups". It was done because people are damn bored and nobody likes a biased poll. Well. Except for AFA, apparently.

When Anderson posted it to his blog on Dec. 18, 2003, the anti-gay-marriage position was leading, with 51.45 percent of respondents opposing gay marriage or civil unions.

See, I was in this from the beginning, starting with theferrett's post. *grins happily*

Yeah, that was fun.


"Hopefully the results of the poll will be a wake-up call," said Smith, "to realize the need for us to get more focused and organized and to do what we need to do."

Is it just me, or is that line VERY SCARY. "Do what we need to do". *shudders*


(edit) Go vote in some similar polls at a similar website. Observe how traditional family values only apply to blonde people.