Flibbertigibbet

No, I'm Still Not Studying

Instead, I'm trying to puzzle out Th'Inkwell's new header. I think very highly of Mrs. White and so I have assumed that each element of the banner has significance unto itself.

First, her tagline: Veritas : Venustas : Sententia

Veritas = Truth
Venustas = Loveliness, charm (feminine)
Sententia = a way of thinking

That was the easy part.

Then we have the Pre-9/11, Manhattan cityscape.

Now the hard part: What is that Latin text that is skewed across there?

At first, I was thinking that it came from a text by an Italian in the high Renaissance named Girolamo Borro. The title of the text is “De motu gravium et levium� and according to the source I found it was written in 1575. It appears to be a text about buoyancy. “About the motion of weight and lightness� or some-such is what the title means.

Given Mrs. White’s thoughtful nature a text on engineering made perfect sense, but I could not match the fragments in her header to any single reference in the text. The closest I got was on page 8 but that’s not it. The look of it matches but the actual text does not.

Here are the fragments I can make out:

deſcribenda
eſt aurea mala
aureis in ea
-errant ſup.illic
-virgineus

So, then I thought it might have come from a text called “De Astronomia� by someone named Hygini. Again, a dead-end. Obviously our girl isn’t giving up her secrets easily.

And there's one more element that I will just go ahead and concede is outside of what I can do with what I have here: the gold and brown stripes are composed of another image. What that image is, exactly, is what I can't figure. Given the color and texture and the citation of other Latin/Renaissance sources best guess is that it’s an image of a manuscript like the other.

So, I spent a couple of hours Googling and carrying on, but I couldn’t find it. I think the Borro text was my best lead, but, alas, it fell through.

Maybe I’ll work on this some more later or just ask her about it.