It’s time to play everybody’s favorite game, “Parody or Not?”—a spinoff of the game that is inexplicably also everybody’s favorite, “Let’s Mock a Wikipedia Article Without Bothering to Improve It.” In today’s round, we quote a section from the Wikipedia article “Carthago delenda est” (quoted here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License), and you, our readers, decide: Parody or not?

The phrase employs delenda, the feminine singular gerundive form of the verb dēlēre (“to destroy”).^[1] The gerundive (or future passive participle) delenda is a verbal adjective that may be translated as “to be destroyed”. When combined with a form of the verb esse (“to be”), it adds an element of compulsion or necessity, yielding “is to be destroyed”, or, as it is more commonly rendered, “must be destroyed”. The gerundive delenda functions as a predicative adjective in this construction,^[2] which is known as the passive periphrastic.

The short form of the phrase, Carthago delenda est, is an independent clause. Consequently, the feminine singular subject noun Carthago appears in the nominative case.^[3] The verb est^[i] functions as a copula—linking the subject noun Carthago to the predicative verbal adjective delenda—and further imports a deontic modality to the clause as a whole.^[4] Because delenda is a predicative adjective in relation to the subject noun Carthago, it takes the same number (singular), gender (feminine) and case (nominative) as Carthago.^[5]

The fuller forms Ceterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem and Ceterum autem censeo delendam esse Carthaginem use the so-called accusative and infinitive construction for the indirect statement. In each of these forms, the verb censeo (“I opine”) sets up the indirect statement delendam esse Carthaginem (“[that] Carthage is to be destroyed”).^[6] Carthaginem, the subject of the indirect statement, is in the accusative case; while the verb esse is in its present infinitive form. Delendam is a predicate adjective in relation to the subject noun Carthaginem and thus takes the same number (singular); gender (feminine); and case (accusative) as Carthaginem.^[7]

Now you decide. Did someone think this was a necessary and useful addition to the article? Or did it occur to some Wikipedia editor that it would be an amusing jab at Wikipedians’ notorious pedantry to spin three fairly long paragraphs of “grammatical analysis” out of three words in Latin? Parody or not?

There is now an easy way for any WordPress site to give visitors the ability to discover whether they are living on land that was never ceded by its original inhabitants. This is a remarkable demonstration of the power the block editor can put in the hands of an ordinary writer with no coding skills.

There is still no easy way to format small capitals.

It is no secret that WordPress runs half the Internet, and dictates what the other half is trying to be—either in imitation or in reaction.

Well, WordPress theme designers, the time has come to learn the difference between a block quote and a pull quote.

Now, for those who simply use the Web, without worrying too much about how it comes to look the way it looks and do what it does, a bit of explanation is in order. The simplest way to make a Web site, at least conceptually, is with simple HTML (“Hypertext Markup Language”) pages—HTML being a series of codes that tell your browser how to render the pages. A little bit of extra “CSS” (“Cascading Style Sheets”) code determines aesthetic things like fonts, column widths, colors, and so on. This is how Dr. Boli runs his Eclectic Library.

But a complex site becomes difficult to manage that way. It is much more efficient to use a “CMS” (“Content Management System”), which takes care of the technical details. The writer writes, the designer designs, and the CMS software puts their work together into a functioning site. The “theme” is the set of CSS codes and other aesthetic instructions that make the site look the way it looks. By changing the “theme,” you can change the whole look of a site all at once.

WordPress, which started as a machine for blogging, has grown into a behemoth of a CMS. This Magazine has used WordPress since 2007, making it a fairly early adopter of the system. The current look of the site is the result of Dr. Boli’s searching the entire universe of WordPress themes and finally giving up on finding one that met his specifications. Instead, he took a very basic theme and rewrote most of the CSS to create the unique aesthetic experience we enjoy today. And he never wants to do that again, because it was a slog.

The problem is that writing WordPress themes requires a good deal of coding. Designers are not necessarily the best coders. Neither are writers. Coders, on the other hand, are not necessarily the best writers or designers. It is a flaw of the system that the design aspects of it are left in the hands of computer programmers. Writers are generally at the mercy of these coders-turned-designers, who dictate how text served up on the Internet will look.

So it is up to us, the informed writers and designers, to teach theme coders what we need.

We could mention many things. We could mention column widths that are correct for comfortable reading. We could mention type fonts that are legible rather than pretty. But today we are mentioning block quotes.

In a printed book or magazine, a block quote is a quotation that seems too long for quotation marks. It is easier to read and sort out which text is the quoted text if these quotations are separated typographically. There is a traditional way of doing this: most often a block quote is indented from the main text on both right and left sides, and frequently the text in the quotation is slightly smaller than the main text.

First and foremost, war is war and military organization is, and must be, tyranny. This is, perhaps, the greatest and most barbarous cost of war and the most pressing reason for its abolition from civilization.

That was a block quote—in this case, a quotation from W. E. B. Du Bois. HTML has a <blockquote> tag for just this purpose. But the theme designer gets to decide how those blockquotes will look. And almost invariably the theme designers decide wrong.

All over the Internet, you will see quoted text that is much larger than the text that surrounds it. Frequently the quotations are also set in italics or bold or a pretty but illegible font, and they may have colored backgrounds and fancy ornamental quotation marks (usually huge and only at the beginning, not the end).

These are not block quotes. These are pull quotes. A “pull quote” is an ornamental graphic element designed to draw attention to part of the text, or more cynically to take up otherwise blank space on a page. It is not meant to be part of the article.

The problem is that theme designers usually assign pull-quote attributes to block quotes, and writers are stuck using them—or, worse, writers who wrote on a site with a well-designed theme wake up one morning to find that someone has decided to change the theme, and all the block quotes are huge and ugly. These huge, ugly, and incorrect quotes are everywhere. They make reading long passages a dreadful chore. They ruin the Internet.

At this point, the problem is almost by definition a WordPress problem, because the power of WordPress over the Internet is so great. It is not merely that half the sites you see are built on WordPress. Even the sites that use a different CMS very often are using adapted WordPress themes. (Dr. Boli’s own “Random Translations,” for example, is run on a much simpler system called “HTMLy,” but the theme is a ported WordPress theme.) So WordPress theme designers are the ones who must be educated.

Here, then, is your education. Block quotes are for quoted text within an article, and should generally appear slightly smaller than the text around them. Pull quotes are a separate thing, and should have their own separate style not likely to be confused with a block quote.

There. That wasn’t so hard.

DuckDuckGo comes through with another profoundly useful image search.

We had quite a conversation about word drift and the curious terminology it produces. (It is still going on, in fact, and since this article was prepared some hours before it was scheduled for publication, it may not mention the most recent comments. That is not meant as a slight; it is only an artifact of our scheduling system here at the Magazine.) Some of us very sensibly pulled down our Greek lexicons, since pillaging the learned languages has always been recognized as a legitimate way to extend our own vocabulary. You could, of course, read the comments themselves and skip this summary, but that would mean that Dr. Boli would have to think of something else to write about today.

“The Shadow” suggested a few terms derived from the verb παρασῦρω, which seems like a perfect choice, since Dr. Boli’s 1858 edition of Pickering’s lexicon defines it as meaning “to draw wrong or awry; to pervert.” “Parasyronym” sounds appropriately fussy and pedantic, with a strong savor of I-know-better-than-you.

“James the Lesser” suggests “periplex” for “a wandering word,” which is a simple and memorable term that has the attractive feature of ending in an X. Marketers know how valuable it is to place an X in a prominent position in a name. “Belfry Bat” suggested “Dissemia” or “dissemiosis” for the process, and “dissemiot” for the result. We could then found a whole literature and science of dissemiotics, and it would doubtless not be long before endowed professorships in the discipline were available.

Bill Clendineng suggests “word accretion,” which sounds like a good term for that subset of usages where a word comes to have so many meanings that it ends up meaningless. “Comprise” is a good example, which has come to mean both “contain” and “be contained”—the original meaning and its opposite.

“DmL” writes, “I like antinym because it approaches being one itself. Summanym I like because it rolls off the tongue and mixes roots.” Later, the same correspondent suggested “mootaphor,” which is so much fun to say that one can hardly keep from walking down the street repeating it over and over like Zippy the Pinhead. (As this article was going to press, “mikeski” suggested, “I think that describes this drift effect on a phrase, instead of on a single word.) “Mary” suggested “syncretion.” “Not least because it doesn’t quite mean what it ought.”

Readers also gave us many examples of these drifted terms. “Mary” pointed out that all forms of vinyl recording are “LPs,” even when they are singles. (This provoked a short rant from Dr. Boli on the many terms in recording technology that have drifted.) She also mentioned “floppy disk” for a disk that plainly does not flop—which became official terminology in the computer business, where 3½-inch removable media are called “floppies.” (And did you notice that little “½”? In Unicode, that is called a “vulgar fraction,” which suggests a curious drift of the word “vulgar” back to its root sense of “used by ordinary people.”) Perhaps there ought to be a separate term for these terms when they have become standard—“floppy” for a rigid medium, for example, or “album” for a collection of tracks on one disk rather than a collection of records in a bound book of sleeves. “Camera,” as “The Shadow” pointed out, is an example of this class of words: it originally meant “chamber” or “room,” but anyone who purchased furniture and draperies for a modern digital camera would be regarded as an eccentric. “Meme,” mentioned by “Belfry Bat,” may soon be added to this list: it is rapidly restricting itself to the meaning “picture with superimposed joke caption in bold capitals.”

“The Shadow” observed yet another class of terms: words that used to refer to people, but now refer to machines. This seems like a legitimate adaptation of terminology, since the term describes the function, and whether that function is performed by a human being, a mechanical device, or a digital computer need not affect the term.

“Belfry Bat” pointed out the numerous terms in the sciences that are misappropriated by pseudointellectual writers. Dr. Boli would add a counterphenomenon, in which scientists and engineers adopt a term for a specialized purpose, and then tell ordinary speakers that they are using it wrong because they use it in the original sense. A good example of this would be “chemical,” which scientists use to mean any element or compound or alloy, so that water is a “chemical”; and then laugh at the ignorance of the general public, who use the term to mean “made by chemistry,” as opposed to occurring naturally. But the definition “made by chemistry” comes from Dr. Johnson. Laugh at him, will you?

Finally, D. Smolken mentions a particularly interesting Jamaican drift, where “deejay” has come to mean “vocalist.” Dr. Boli would point out an analogous drift in American popular culture, where through a similar series of intermediate stages “MC” has evolved to mean “rapper.”

Dr. Boli will not attempt to select from among the alternative terms proposed by his correspondents. But here is an experiment you might try: launch any one of these terms into the billowing waves of the social media, and see how long it takes to drift into meaning something related but different.