St. Jerome, the patron saint of librarians and language translators lived from 347 to about 420 CE, is regarded as the most learned of the Latin Fathers, reputed to have translated many of the biblical texts from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin. Jerome is remembered, perhaps too well, for a single mistake he made, the first use of the term placebo. When he translated the ninth line of Psalm 116, the original Hebrew translated into English should say, “I will walk before the Lord in the lands of the living…” Yet Jerome translated the line into Latin as “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” which in English is, “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living.” Whoops
Nobody knows why he chose to use the verb ‘placere,’ which means to please, or why he put it in the first person singular future tense (-bo) to mean, “I will please.” Some suggest that he was only trying to find a word that would fit the pentameter better. Recall how very complicated Latin prose was. Sentences were read in a specific rhythm, the iambic pentameter, and writers are given broad license to alter words to fit into the meter. Whatever the reason, Jerome opted to use a word incongruent with the original meaning. In recent centuries, Jerome’s choice of words has taken on a meaning of its own.
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