Mumpsimus

Mumpsimus is a common in classical philology jocular expression that is used to criticize a conservative grotesquely dealing with traditional text or in a broader sense a thoughtless tradition verhaftetes insistence on traditional customs.

The word goes back to an anecdote, which is apparently ( first printed 1517) first in De qui ex doctrina fructu percipitur ( " The Value of Education" ) of the English humanist Richard Pace is: A monk had at the celebration of the Holy Mass according to the Communion according to his missal always quod ore mumpsimus, Domine, pura elements capiamus read. Be advised that there is a word " mumpsimus " do not give and there had been a mistake in his copy, the ( " what we have received with the mouth " ) is correct to quod ore sumpsimus, he replied that he had read all his life and so will be not interchange " mumpsimus " against this new-fangled " sumpsimus ", whatever necessitated the Latin language and the mind.

The word and implicitly also the anecdote related can already be found in a letter of Erasmus to Henry Bulloch from 1516 mentioned. In classical philology it spread because Richard Bentley used it in a famous essay. Since Bentley was raised by German philologists modeled in the nineteenth century, the word is often since then also in German altphilologischen treatises, more often in a polemical occasional writings and in the learned correspondence, so when Friedrich August Wolf, Wilamowitz and his students. In classical philology is denoted by statements such as " he is reading his old mumpsimus " an extreme insistence on the traditional text, which tries to stop to emend corrupt text passages by conjecture, even if the necessary improvement is obvious.

In English, the word also about the narrow field of philology is also common to refer to people that are not accessible in their insistence on traditional beliefs or customs of a rational policy.