I am at the moment reading with a great deal of pleasure the Memoirs of the late W.B. Stanford (Hinds Publishing, Dublin), who was for 40 years Regius professor of Greek at Trinity, and for 20 a representative of his university in Seanad Eireann. I remember him as a kindly, courteous scholar, always liable during the course of conversation to start a word at home and hunt it in the dark through Gaul and Greece and into Noah's Ark, if I may paraphrase Cowper. He hated certain words; temperance, which to both Catholic and Protestant had come to mean total abstinence from alcohol, was one of them. Listen to him:
"At one of these missions, probably after songs like Have Courage, My Lad, To Say No, the climactic moment came when children went up to the platform to be saved from the evils of alcoholism and to receive the `blue ribbon', the Protestant equivalent of the Pioneer badge. I wanted to go up. Surprisingly, my mother told me not to. I am not sure why . . . At all events I have good reason to be grateful to her for her restraint. Later, as a classical student at Trinity I deplored the use of that ancient and honourable word temperentia, `temperance' (the Greek sophrosune - one of Plato's four Cardinal Virtues, with courage, prudence and justice) as a synonym for total abstinence. For that reason, I once pained a group of Methodists who had invited me as a Senator to address them on what they called `temperance'. I spoke on the classical meaning of the word, quoting St Paul's advice to Timothy to take a little wine for the sake of his digestion and the Psalmist's reference to "wine that maketh glad the heart of man". The assembled teetotalers were not pleased . . .
"It is sad when words are misappropriated like that, especially when they have an honourable and elegant history . . . Advertisers are the worst sinners in this. A disinfectant is called Milton, there is an olive oil called Dante, and worst of all for those who cherish the classical Greek tradition, to kalon, the term for the good and the beautiful, was the name given to a face powder, Tokalon."
He remembered his Waterford school slang. "[Some] words were relics of the time when Latin was widely spoken in grammar schools: Pax for I don't want to fight, and Quis? when one wanted to give something away, to be answered by Ego. The only Gaelic term I can remember was kippeen (cipin) for a hockey stick."