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Comment by bartonfink | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any idea what crespo and crespulum mean? I checked two of my dead-tree Latin dictionaries and even resorted to an online search and came up empty. This is going to stick in my craw for a while until I can sort it out. Any other Latinists out there with ideas?

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I was wondering the same thing; I checked the French dictionary on my desk and "crépir" (which would be the expected derivative of "crespire") means "roughcast", or plastering/cementing without smoothing the surface. I also found a Portuguese word "crespo" meaning something like "ragged". So I can sort of make sense of the phrase "quis crespit crespulum" in context as "those in a rough spot leave rough edges".

But I'm not at all confident of that analysis.

I'm also curious because Crespo is my last name. "Quis crespit crespulum" might make a nice personal slogan — depending on what it means.

Not sure, but maybe: "Quis crepuit crepulum." Who rattles the one/thing rattling? I want to say that adding the "s" is a medievalism, but I can't find evidence of that. Crepo is also first conjugation so this might just be totally wrong. Maybe it was just to make the phrase closer to custodiet and custodies?

I was wondering the same thing. Crespare means "to curl" in Italian. So it means... Who will curl the curly? I suspect it's some sort of pun on a well-known Latin phrase, but I have no idea what it would be.

Don't be misled: the -are and -ire endings mark different conjugations (per my other comment, a Latin "crespare" would have become "créper" in French, which means "frizz" or "crimp" and is thus almost certainly cognate to your Italian word, but not to the "crespit" of the OP).

The phrasing is very similar to "quis custodiet custodies" - who watches the watchmen - which is a very well known phrase. The most I can make of this is "Who $foo's the $foo'ers".

It's BS Latin like the non legitima carborundum stuff. Just fake Latin.

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