Timothy Francis-Wright wrote:
>
> joanna bujes wrote:
> >>U.S. stops somewhere short of the power over his _familio_ exercised by
> >>a Roman Pater Famillius (I think I've got my declensions wrong).
> >
> >It's "familia", not that it matters all that much.
> >
> >Joanna
>
> And it's pater familias [_familiae_ is grammatically correct
> but my better half's dictionary says that the archaic
> _familias_ is idiomatic], not that it matters, either.
>
Actually, it matters a little. Personally, it matters because lapses of memory piss me off at myself. But also, in making political statements one ought to try not to break the reader's attention by screwing up on minor details.
(The familiO in the original was a typo rather than a memory error. The rest was bad memory.)
Carrol