Qualis artifex periit
Gary Gygax has died. May his soul find the appropriate outer plane of existence.
Internal Monologue puts it perfectly.
Like Zac, I missed a chance to fulfill a Gygax-related dream: I wanted to ask him if he'd considered a Latin name. On Wikipedia we normally Latinize the given name(s) of any modern person, but leave their surname(s) unchanged, unless we have evidence that they use or used a different form. But as I note here it's hard to Latinize Gary (my suggestion is Geisericus), and Gygax lends itself well to declension. Mr. Gygax seemed like the sort of person who might have considered a Latin name at some point in his life, so I really wanted to ask him at last Gen Con. But I didn't run into him, and thinking I'd get a chance this summer, I didn't try too hard to contact him. Now the world will probably never know.
ADDENDVM: I should especially have called attention to this paragraph from Zac's write-up:
I will also miss Gygax's idiosyncratic style. My verbal SAT score was at least 60 points higher because of Gygax's predilection for recondite vocabulary (milieu, denizen, enervate, and the whole gamut of Latin abbreviations: i.e., cf., e.g., qv., et al.).
This is utterly true. In fact, it might even be fair to blame my obsession with Latin on Gygax's use of these abbreviations.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jdm314) wrote,
sad
