‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James Russell Lowell where he found decuman, meaning ‘big wave’. The line ‘Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman’ came in Lowell’s ‘The Cathedral’ (1870) about Chartres. Lowell was Longfellow’s big-beardy successor as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard. Though fellow members of the Fireside Poets, both fearlessly translated Dante and Homer.
Lowell had no idea where decuman had come from. Ovid and Lucan used decumanus, he found, of a wave, but not absolutely, as a noun. Finally he unearthed it as a noun in Du Cange’s dictionary, citing ‘one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which’. It was Tertullian, no likely source.
However, Lowell no doubt read Rabelais. In a litany, Rabelais says of Quaresmeprenant (Shrovetide in the translation of Motteux) that he ‘fished in the air, and there used to catch decumane lobsters’.
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