I’d rather be in an apple tree/than a bad boy in adversity
I’d rather be . . . where? Are those my only choices? And what does an apple tree have to do with learning Latin? Well, it has to do with this curious Latin sentence: Malo malo malo malo.
I first heard this sentence some years ago. One of my students shared it with me. He had learned it, apparently, from a previous teacher. He was very pleased to inform me that it translates into English as:
I would rather be in an apple tree
Than a bad boy in adversity
And it does in fact mean that . . . or can, anyway. It’s a sterling example of Latin’s unique ability to be painfully precise and maddeningly ambiguous at the same time.
The Bad Old Days?
But what’s the point? I’ll get to that. First, however, I’d like to put to rest one of those pernicious myths that has plagued education for the past century or so. In the Bad Old Days, or so this myth maintains, students spent most of their time engaged in the dreaded Rote Memorization. At the same time, there was no expectation that they understand what they were learning.
This narrative is pernicious for several reasons. In the first place, it’s simply false. Beyond that, it’s had deleterious consequences for the last several generations of students.
Now, I concede that students were required to do quite a bit more memorization in the past than is common today. The purveyors of the narrative I cite above, however, never explain how that prevented students from understanding what they studying. The opposite, in fact, is true. We can’t understand what we don’t even know. We can’t draw valid conclusions if we don’t have the facts. Memorization gives us the matter to feed our cogitations.
Lost Tools of Learning
Just as acquiring data must be prior to drawing conclusions, our memorization abilities develop earlier than our power to reason. We are something akin to memorization machines at the stage of development preceding the onset of puberty. This stage, as Dorothy Sayers explains in her famous essay The Lost Tools of Learning:
is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age one readily memorises the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.
Having learned this through generations of experience, our ancestors made the most of the sponge-like quality of the pre-pubescent mind by expecting students to do a whole lot of what they did best. That is to say, memorization. But they also expected those students who pursued their studies further (many fewer, granted, than is the case today) to develop more advanced cognitive abilities at the appropriate time. Dorothy Sayers explains the entire system of traditional or “medieval” education quite eloquently in the essay I cite above.
Ain’t We Got Fun
You’re probably wondering, at this point, what this has to do with “I’d rather be in an apple tree” and so on. Don’t worry, we’re getting there. We should first point out that the modern narrative about the evils of rote memorization also creates a false impression (implicitly, at least) about how that system of memorization worked. Yes, learners did need to commit word lists, charts of forms, and various other collections of information to memory. But our ancestors understood quite well that we remember information better, and understand its significance better, if we know it in a meaningful context. Furthermore, they recognized the value of humor and even what we modern folks call “fun.”
As a result, teachers developed a large number of mnemonic devices to aid their student’s task of memorization. These Mnemonics were often funny, and always (as we would expect) memorable. In the case of Latin, doggerel verse proved to be a particularly effective type of mnemonic. Alexander of Villedieu even composed an entire Latin grammar of about 2,000 lines of doggerel. This by the way in the year 1199, a time which many moderns may not consider to be particularly given to humor. In any case, students enjoyed the silly verse and at the same time absorbed important vocabulary words and points of grammar.
Malo malo malo malo
Malo malo malo malo is a well-known doggerel verse of this sort. This one, however, doesn’t go back to the twelfth century. Given how nicely it translates into goofy English rhyme, we can surmise that somebody composed it just a couple of centuries ago for the edification of English schoolboys. Students can absorb a surprising number of things from this simple statement of four words . . . or is it one word four times?
In any case, the primary purpose of this particular piece of doggerel is to help students remember and distinguish between three otherwise unrelated words that share the root mal-. These are the irregular verb malo, malle (“prefer”), the noun malum, mali (“apple”), and the adjective malus, -a, -um (“bad”). As an added bonus, students have an amusing and evocative way of remembering various points of grammar. Let’s look at each malo and see what it has to show us.
Malo malo . . .
The first malo is the verb meaning “prefer” in the 1st person singular, present tense, so the subject is “I”. This word is derived from the irregular verb volo, “I wish,” as is nolo, “I don’t wish.” All three follow the same irregular conjugation. In English we can render this form either as “I prefer” or “I’d rather.” A complementary infinitive or direct object normally accompanies it. When neither of these is present (as is the case here) we can assume an understood esse. And so, “I’d rather be . . .”
The next malo is the noun malum. Like oliva and other similar terms, the word can refer either to the fruit itself or to the tree that produces it. We can take it to mean the tree here. The ending -o can be either the old Locative case, or the more usual Ablative Place Where without the preposition in (as often happens in poetry). Either way we get “in an apple tree.”
. . . malo malo
The third malo is the adjective malus, “bad.” Latin adjectives can take the place of nouns. We call these adjective-nouns substantives. The gender helps us fill out the meaning. Malus, for example, is a bad man or boy. Likewise, mala is a bad woman, and malum is a bad thing. If we take the third malo as a masculine Ablative of Comparison we get “than a bad boy.”
Malo is a substantive form of malus yet again the fourth time we see it. Here it’s neuter. We see the same form in the Lord’s Prayer: Libera nos a malo, “deliver us from evil.” In the verse under discussion, we can take it to mean a bad situation. Like malo #2, we have a Place Where construction. Hence, “in adversity.”
Not a Bad Day’s Work
Put it all together and, hey presto! we get “I’d rather be in an apple tree than a bad boy in adversity.” In the process, we’ve given students a vivid mnemonic to help them remember and distinguish between the three mal– words. Not only that, they receive a lesson on Place Where (both Locative and Ablative), the Ablative of Comparison, substantives, and the use of malle and its irregular brethren.
Not a bad day’s work for one little bit of doggerel.
The Turn of the Screw
There’s one other interesting feature of malo malo malo malo. Benjamin Britten used it as the basis of an aria for his 1954 opera based on Henry James’ gothic horror novella, The Turn of the Screw. His librettist Myfanwy Piper had found the verse in an old textbook owned by one of her elderly aunts. Given the context, the doggerel takes on a rather darker tone in Britten’s opera. The clip below is from the 2011 Glyndbourne Opera Festival. Thomas Parfitt plays the part of Miles and Miah Persson is the governess.
