I enjoy and appreciate the way you all are answering Dr. Smith's > question.
Me too. The discussion has now pretty much petered out on all three groups. It ran longest on alt.language.latin, which also yielded the best (IMHO) answer/guess. As Nightmist so aptly put it:
The problem with [L]atin is it varies a bit from school to school and
> purpose to purpose. Modern school (medical, horticultural, and so on)
> [L]atin is differen from [C]hurch [L]atin is different from "classical"
> [L]atin is different from medival [L]atin etc.
This was affirmed, in a way, over in alt.language.latin by Johannes Patruus:
In cases like this a definitive verdict is probably unattainable and we
> have to settle for approximations.
That's pretty much what I was expecting:
I'm not necessarily looking for a
> literal translation. Rather, what the common person-on-the-via Appia
> might have called a crazy quilt (or what they might call it today if
> Latin weren't "dead").
As far as the quilt part goes, accord> ... perhaps we should be looking in a different direction for a better
descriptive of the *intent* of "crazy"; I'm reasonably convinced that
> whoever chose that particular word was being cute/humorous, working in
> the vernacular, going for multiple meanings, [and/or] pizzazz. "Crazy quilt"
> sounds a whole lot more attention-grabbing, and rolls off the tongue
> much easier, than "irregular-patch quilt" or "made-from-leftovers
> quilt", or other literal albeit better descriptive terms.
But in common Latin usage, a descriptive term is indeed very likely what would have been used. Going back to the translation site, after trying several adjectives to get their colloquial meanings, the two best choices I found were:
inaequalis, inaequale, inaequalior -or -us, inaequalissimus -a -um ADJ [XXXBO] uneven; unequal; not smooth/level (surface); irregular (shape); patchy/ variable
and
inordinatus, inordinata, inordinatum ADJ [XXXCO] disordered, not arranged; irregular; disorderly, not legal; occurring irregularly; in confusion; W:not in formation (troops);
Which leaves us with two candidates: cento inaequalis or cento inordinatus
Patruus confirms:
Both of the above are correct in form, and perhaps as close to being as
> accurate in meaning as we are going to get. If you need the plurals, they
> are centones inaequales and centones inordinati.
For my own answer (the one I was looking for when I began this saga), I've settled on the former - cento inaequalis - YMMV. Another idea that sprang from my original thought (to embroider the Latin phrase on my crazy quilt) is to have a block with *several* or *all* of the suggested phrases embroidered on it! Let the peons figure THAT one out! 8^D
If anyone's interested, I encourage you to visit the other discussion groups and review the threads; there's a lot of interesting stuff there, and I learned a LOT.
Dr. Smith Oh, the pain... THE PAIN...