Carpe Chionodoxa - Seize the Glory of Snow - Director's Commentary

Ok, so I though 'Seize the Snow' would be a really cool title for my next posting, and the only thing that would make it cooler would be to do it Caesar-style. But since I don't know crap from carpe about Latin I thought I'd just jump on Ye Olde Googlee and have it do all the work as I sat back and smiled to myself, revelling in my resourcefulness. The problem is, though, for as long as Latin's been around, you'd think there'd be more people talking about it... but for the most part, the internet seems to run quite nicely without it. Fortunately, thanks to sophomore English, I knew that 'Carpe Diem' meant 'Seize the Day' which means I was one word away from success. So I finally found this great Latin to English dictionary that was completely useless to me, since I already speak English, and mostlikely useless to any Latin speakers, because I think they're all dead. Fine. So I get granular and Google for, "All I want is the freakin word for SNOW in Latin" but apparently that wasn't specific enough. Next I Asked Jeeves, but he's not a big fan of the dead languages either. Eventually I found some Latin convention's website where the vocabulary word of the day was 'Snow' and this is what it said:

• nix, nivis, f., snow
• nivalis, -e, adj., of snow, snowy, snow-like
• niveus, -a, -um, adj., snowy, snow-white
• nivosus, -a, -um, adj., full of snow

So now I've got 3 adjectives and an 'f'. I was really hoping for a 'n' or possibly a 'v' so I'd know if it was a noun or a verb. Now this is just a guess, but I think 'f' is for,"foo" as in "FOO, you ain't gonna learn no Latin over the internet," but I could be wrong about that.

You know how sometimes you notice things in your periferal vision that you wouldn't see if you looked directly at them? Deeper in the search results my eye happened to catch a link to a linguists page that mentioned a flower called Chiondoxa aka 'The Glory of Snow.' Following that lead, it turns out that yes, Chionodoxa is indeed the Latin name for a little blue flower. Nix this Nivis crap, I'm going with that. It's perfect! Well, almost perfect. Shouting, "Seize the little blue flower" wasn't exactly the message I was going for, but it gets worse. Apparently, the translation of the phrase "Modern Latin Name" means, "Greek" in this case because Chionodoxa (khion "snow" doxa "glory") is definitely of Greek origin.

So what I learned tonight was how to say "Seize the Weed," in what I like to call 'Greco-Roman,' which I suspect, if it was ever uttered at all, was probably used to describe an illegal wrestling move. And I also learned that Latin is so frickin impossible you apparently have to be dead to figure it out.
What a load of Carpe.