Overarching Sentiments

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I was in New York City recently, and I was walking out of Penn Station

When this building across the street caught my eye. It was this stately neoclassical structure

With these rows of tall Greek columns, and above them there was this frieze running the length of

The building, and the frieze was inscribed with these big capital letters. But what they spelled

That gave me a little jolt. I don’t know. It was just so grand. I expected to see Latin,

But the inscription said, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers

From the swift completion of their appointed rounds. And of course, Grant, you know what

Building that is. That’s the Green Lantern headquarters. No, no, that’s the U.S. Postal

Service. Yes, that’s the James Farley post office there. But you know, it made me think about what we

Expect to read when we see something that somebody’s taken all the trouble to inscribe

In stone. For some reason, I was expecting Latin, although I did find out later that this saying is

Actually a translation of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. It didn’t originate with

The U.S. Postal Service. There’s a part of the history of Herodotus where he talks about the

Efficient messengers of the Persian Empire. You know, there’s messages like this on buildings

Across the world. And a lot of them, of course, have that classical idea going back to

Ancient Greece or ancient Rome. And there’s one over the entrance to the Goodhue building at the

Los Angeles Public Library. And it says, books invite all, they constrain none.

And the simplicity and the perfection of that message is just, oh, it’s a chef’s kiss.

That’s exactly right. But you know, there are other messages for other buildings that you might not see. And sometimes they’re over houses. And there’s one I found especially charming. It was in a journal, an old journal from the 1800s. And it was on a small house in the UK. And it’s in Latin. And it’s parvaced apta mihi. But in English, it means small, but just right for me.

And yeah you know a little cottage you know with a little bit of garden and just someplace you can

Sit and it’s exactly what you want and there’s another one in the in the same bit of journal

And it’s also in latin but i’ll give you the english and it says as the body is to the mind

So the house is to the body this house is an organism where all the pieces work together to

Produce this feeling of an entity. And I just love that over the door as you enter, that you

Acknowledge that you’re entering into this space that is all working in concert to create this

Feeling, this presence that a house has. Yeah, that’s a lovely sentiment. I’m suspecting that

The listeners have more too. Is there a particular inscription or an epigraph over a building that

You know and love, something that strikes you as funny or poignant or moving, please share.

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