E pluribus stultitia

In Vermont, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin wrote a letter to the Minority Leader of the Vermont Senate suggesting that Vermont should have a Latin motto, in addition to --  but not replacing -- the official English motto ("Freedom and Unity"). So, the people involved came up with this:

Stella quarta decima fulgeat. The translation: “May the Fourteenth Star Shine Bright,” is a nod to Vermont’s status as the fourteenth state to join the union. Nice. Poetic in both languages.

So then the legislature passes a resolution, which takes very little time and costs no money. Right? Wrong. Guess what happened next?

Here's a post about the story from a Vermont blog: No good deed goes unpunished. 

Apparently a local TV station did a story about it and got a huge number of incredibly ignorant comments on their Facebook page, here: WCAX: One state senator thinks Vermont should have a Latin motto. What do you think?.

The crazies came out of the woodwork: "If you live in the United States, you need to learn English!" "Vermont ain't no Latino area." "This is America, not Mexico or some other Latin-American country." And so on.

Samples:

Dorothy Lynn Lepisto: “I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places have American mottos?”

Norman Flanders: “What next Arab motto??”

Kevin P. Hahn: “How about ‘go back south of the boarder'”

Richard Mason: “We are AMERICANS, not latins, why not come up with a Vermont motto that is actually from us”

Judy Lamoureux: “Throw him out of the country tell him to take obama with him!”

Phil Salzano: “My question is, are we Latin, or are we Vermonters? Alright then, English it is…..”

Lori Olds: “I thought this was USA why are they trying to make Americans aliens”

Chris Ferro: “That’s a BIG NO, if you live in the United State YOU need to learn ENGLISH!!”

Julie Kellner: “No, you a USA citizen!.. Learn & understand the language!!!.”

Kurtis Jones: “No cause vt ain’t no Latino area. Leave the motto alone”

Zeb Swierczynski: “ABSOLUTLY NOT!!!! sick and tired of that crap, they have their own countries”

Ken Curtis: “Just when I felt our represenatives could not possibly get any dumber , they come up with this…get real… this is the USA, not some Moslim or Mexican country…stop given in to these people…PRESS 1 for English and forget the rest… worry about the problems you were elected to do”

Ronald Prouty Jr. “No way this is America not Mexico or Latin America. And they nee to learn our language, just like if we go there they want us to speak theirs”

Kristen Wright: “thats un called for this is the usa”

Kelley Dawley: “How do you say idiotic senator in spanish? I’d settle for deport illegals in spanish as a back up motto”

Heather Chase: “Seriously?? Last time I checked..real vermonters were speakin ENGLISH.. NOT LATIN..good god…”

I pass over the grammatical and spelling errors in these remarks by defenders of the English language.

You may remember that Vice-President Dan Quayle was alleged to have said,  "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people." 

Though widely reported in the press, because sadly it sounded exactly like something he would say, it turned out that this was a joke at his expense, told oddly enough by a Republican, Representative Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island. In her defense, Schneider said it was a joke at the time, but that little fact got unreported.

Like so many little facts.