“Fābāmur thematis fātī,” vel, qualiter didicī quiēscere sollicitārī et Latinum amāre

(“We Were Speaking of Fate”, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Latin)

On 2020-03-27, I translated Where Monsters Are in Dreams’ level name “We Were Speaking of Fate” to Latin as “Fābāmur thematis fātī”. This is actually wordy: its most obvious literal translation is “we were speaking of the theme of fate”. “Fābāmur fātī” would be more precise and concise, so why didn’t I use that? Two reasons:

1. Thema, whence thematis, has an alternate meaning: the alignment of celestial bodies at a person’s birth, horoscope (per Wiktionary, whither all links on this page go, apart from the footer). So, metonymically, also fate. (I don’t believe in astrology, but I set that aside for the sake of poetic license.)
2. Fābāmur is the active imperfect indicative first-person plural form of the verb for, or I speak. As if by fate, fātum (destiny, fate, lot, death, speech of a god, utterance, declaration, proclamation, prediction, prophecy), whence fātī, is the neuter form of for’s perfect active participle, fātus; thus, it also means spoken, said, told, foretold, related, predicted, or having or had spoken.

Putting this all together, “Fābāmur thematis fātī” can also mean “we were speaking of the fate of the foretold”, “we were speaking of the fate of the spoken”, and so on. It also effectively packs two puns or double entendres into three words. I found this absolutely wild (in reaction to this, I wrote “Latin is amazing” on Discord), and it turned Latin from a casual interest into an obsession.

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