Latin - the fun language

Okay, it all started with the posting of this lyric on Savoynet (I don't remember why):

Urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvom adducimus.
Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum.

Which one of our members suggested is just crying out to be included in some light opera somewhere. Anyway, another member gave the following translation (by Robert Graves):

Home we bring the bald whoremonger,
Romans lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.

And which, after some further discussion, Adam rendered thus:

Hail the great whoremonger!
Hide away your wives!
Rome's children will be stronger
After he arrives!
The money you have paid in
To fight your distant wars
Has gone to keep him laden
In beer and Gallic whores!

I like Adam's version the best and agree that light opera is the poorer for not having it as a lyric somewhere. One day. One day

And Arthur followed up with the this anecdote, which he said I could post.

> > For the classicists (among whom I am not), here's the original:
> >
> > Urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvom adducimus.
> > Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum.

It's not a very literal translation of the Latin verb "effutuo," but that's probably just as well. (Effutuo is a compound of the Latin verb futuo, from which we get an English verb that also begins with the letters fu-.)

In my Latin-teaching days, I told my first-year classes to learn thoroughly the irregular principal parts of the verb "to be"-- sum, esse, fui-- since, if they looked up "fui" in a Latin dictionary, they wouldn't find it. One student, when he came to a homework sentence with the word "fui," didn't remember my tip but did show some initiative. He went to the library, found a Latin-English dictionary, looked under fu-, and found the verb futuo. The next day he volunteered to translate the sentence in class. Luckily the dictionary was also euphemistic, translating "futuo" as "have connexion with a woman."

Arthur (of whom one student wrote "His pedanticism is insufferable")