Saturnalia

by Lindsey Davis

  I would also like to apologise to all my translators and to acknowledge their ingenuity in their constant battle with my vocabulary. It will take real woozlers to devise graceful equivalents for ‘fragonage’ and ‘ferrikin’ in Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and all the other languages in which Falco novels are published; the special use in the Fusculus context of ‘nipping’ and ‘foisting’—though real words in theory—won’t be easy either. Sometimes one of you honest men and women is drawn to approach me diffidently about a really impossible word or phrase and I want to say thank you for the courtesy with which you do this—and for not gloating when it turns out that the answer is, ‘That is not a Lindseyism; it is a previously undiscovered typing error.’

  ‘Wonk’ is real, by the by. My new American editor used it, then defined it for me, and it is here to fulfil my promise to try and ‘get it past Oliver’. (He saw it. He exclaimed at it, but he has not crossed it out, so it stays.)

  Chapter XVIII was a deliberate bit of fun. There is an official Lindseyism in another chapter. I know my rights.

  I think very carefully about my choice of words—even when I make them up. When I do, I think they work. Try them out if you like, though do heed Falco’s caution: it is not necessary to know these words to be a Roman and you don’t want people thinking you are eccentric…