Um… I am getting ready to work tomorrow and for some reason I thought about the Latin word for work. I should really get ready for bed, but the Latin word for work has been keeping me up. I remember my past teacher telling me that the (perhaps colloquial) word for work was nonotium, but I can’t find any traces of this usage on a dictionary or google. Now I am wondering if this is just really a rare usage of otium or plainly incorrect information parlayed to me…
(Yes, I looked up the definition of work on Cassell’s English-Latin section…)
I can’t find nonotium in an online or offline dictionary. Traupman in “Conversational Latin” gives the obvious labor and opera (and opus for the product or piece of work) which you know already, but also questus -us for work = one’s job (as a means of livelihood) which is less obvious, perhaps, but no sign of nonotium as one word. However, you know that “non otium” = non-leisure time. So you will find the use of “non otium” as two words to mean “work” in many places (via its sense of non leisure time “it’s not a laborless task” = “its work”) --search Google again for “non otium”. So, in particular contexts it (the phrase) does mean work.
You might be thinking of the word “negotium” maybe? Whitaker’s WORDS give “pain, trouble, annoyance, distress; work, business, activity, job;” as the definition.
Thanks for the replies, but I really do believe that my teacher said non otium. I didn’t know if it was one or two words, but regardless, I think she is mistaken to tell us such rare or unconventional usage of the word work. Oh well, I will have to settle for boring words like opera or labor.
Salve 1%homeless. If it’s any consolation, consider how beautiful the words “opera” and “labor” are. Because, when you look them up in a dictionary such as Lewis and Short, you find they each have approximately two full columns each, full of lovely and subtle and complex distinctions as to the differences between them and their shifts in senses in different contexts. They get me excited anyway.
