ancient Greek things I've seen on TV that haunt me

As a classical scholar, it’s important not to be too precious and pedantic about common mistakes with the material you’ve made it your life’s work to study. That way lies madness. I think a lot about this picture I was sent by the teachers who ran the “worry group” my six-year-old son was in last year to help him freak out less:

Honestly, we all need to memorize this chart. So many good reminders here! It’s not just useful for anxious kids and for those of us who need to remember that we can’t control mistakes that others make, like using “decimate” to mean “destroy utterly.” We can only control… play-doh? Sure. That works.¹

With that said, sometimes I see something on TV that makes me want to scream, “OH MY GOD JUST PAY A GRAD STUDENT $10.” In the above linked piece, I mention one of the worst offenders: Kevin in Brooklyn 99, a classics professor, saying “I don’t bring home Beowulf” as though Beowulf were The Iliad. But that’s not the only incident that I haven’t gotten over (and have maybe brought up in therapy, like I’m Ryan Gosling in that Papyrus SNL sketch).

Here are a few of those.

Kim-Joy’s “Atlatis” cookie from GBBO Season 9

In the finale of the Great British Bake Off, Kim-Joy Hewlett made the city of Atlantis out of cookies. It was awesome, although Rahul was definitely my favorite contestant that year. However, when I saw this cookie that says “Atlatis,” I uttered a strangled gurgle-scream that really unsettled my dog.

I will say that this wasn’t Kim-Joy’s fault, but rather Sandy’s:

Somehow the fact that she got the circumflex over the eta right makes the whole thing worse for me.

The way they pronounce ‘Aristotle’ in The Good Place

NOT the scene in this screenshot, which is the perfect version of the Aristotle/Chipotle joke. I’m talking about the way Aristotle’s name is pronounced throughout the entire show, with the emphasis on the penult (ie, second to last syllable): ArisTOTle. Who pronounces it that way???? Everyone I know pronounces it ARistotle, except for particularly douchey classicists who call him Aristoteles, and even then it’s AristoTELes. The accent is never on the tot, people!

I still love this show, so I want to include one more perfect Good Place Aristotle joke:

The Gormogon Vault in Bones Season 3

This is a deep cut from a show I used to watch religiously and then got deeply, deeply sick of long before it ended. But believe me when I say that, for classicists, this shit is the stuff of nightmares:

Maybe not for all classicists. Maybe just for me and my ex, who were HORRIFIED by this snippet of “ancient Greek text,” which allegedly says “Will no one save the widow’s son,” isn’t technically grammatically heinous but DOES read like a first-year prose comp assignment. But that’s nothing compared to the truly upsetting way that nobody seems to have noticed that it’s using two different Greek fonts – a more stylized one for the consonants and unaccented vowels, and a more Helvetica-y one for the accented vowels. If you’ve ever had to format any ancient Greek in a word processor, this is the kind of shit that you have residual trauma from but also can’t help being a snob about.

And now, a palate cleanser (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4):

Beautiful. The actual text of Sappho 1! The very same text that my ex likes to write out on papyrus scraps to give to women she’s into. Just a lovely moment of classical reception (in a show that’s definitely problematic at times, but what isn’t?).

The moral of this story is that classics grad students would be happy to help you check your ancient Greek. Probably for free, if we’re being honest. You’d kind of be doing them a favor and saving them a lot of stress dreams.

1. Props to whatever kid — not mine — answered “things with a controller” to the question “what are things we can control?” Love that.