i liked this

It's worrisome enough getting someone to tattoo symbols on you when the tattoo artist doesn't know what it means (potentially leading to missed letters or characters), but when you don't know either .. sigh.

My wife has a math term (something like the stuff on here, referring to limits) tattooed on her back. I don't know enough math to double-check the work, and it wasn't until she looked at a picture of her tattoo that she noticed two errors - one omission of her own fault, another was a problem from the text not copying onto her skin and turning a zero into a "c". She was able to get the tattoo fixed, and she was happy with the process of correction, making it more personal.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

This is awesome. I love this. I think it's Blue-worthy, myself.

Isn't this bit of incorrect Latin from Handmaiden's Tale? I could be mistaken.

Oh, wikipedia says it's older and "well-known mock-Latin aphorism". Regardless, I think its age has moved it from "silly and wrong translation" to "cultural artifact".

Yeah, the "carborundum" variants have pretty wide currency. Safire marks it as dog-Latin and there's a long tradition of that.

I appreciate Latin myself but have a sensaiuma.

It probably gets under the nerves of pedants because it's implicitly mocking them.

On a related note, my Chinese friend always has fun watching people with Chinese alphabet tattoos. He once met a girl who had a tattoo of a Chinese character for love on her shoulder. Except she had no idea that the character actually stood for "soy sauce".

*gets tea up nose*