conuly

At night, I am haunted by dreams of the dreaded Passive Periphrastic (cue dramatic music)

Yes, the Passive Periphrastic, together with its minion in evil, the Dative of Personal Agent goes daily to torment innocent Latin students such as myself. Wait, you say? The Dative of Personal Agent? That's right. The DATIVE. Normally, the dative is content to sit back and let the Ablative express the idea of Personal Agent, a task to which the changeable Ablative is quite suited... but when the Passive Periphrastic appears, our normal mild mannered Dative turns into a demon... from.... hades.....

The Passive Periphrastic is very dangerous, and will pop up where you least expect it. Hiding as a simpleminded gerundive + sum, it will appear simply to convey a sense of duty, obligation, or necessity. We wait, dreading the syntax question... the question "what is the tense of verb?" which will, when correctly answered, turn our well written translations into nothing but grammatical mush. One cannot merely convey a sense of duty, obligation, or necessity by using the simple verb debeo, debere, oh no. One must employ... the Passive Periphrastic, not knowing that each use of the dreaded Passive Periphrastic with the Dative of Personal Agent brings the user one step closer... to hades.

Do you see? Do you understand? Do you feel my nervous breakdown?

All the fault... of the Passive Periphrastic. Fear it.

_________

_{Understanding the joke:

The passive periphrastic is a form of the verb which, as I've said, is used to convey a sense of duty, obligation, or necessity. It is distressingly common, and, even more upsettingly, I often get it wrong and translate it as something else. So does everyone. Last time we had a passive periphrastic, before Professor Dunkle could get us all reciting "duty, obligation, or necessity" like the good little parrots we are, I said "that thing haunts me in my sleep". The line stuck with me, and I decided to write a silly little entry concerning it. Sorry, duckies. I promise, less Latin, more English.}