Watch the spelling, they say

@DrWatson A symbol of how focused we've become on "me."

CincinnatUS became CincinnatI

@Mamapolo2016
Yes, you DO need a hobby! 😄


Actually, the story is pretty interesting. Cincinnatus was a farmer who, when Rome was under attack, joined the army and rose to prominence as a military leader. The legend about him is that although he could have distinguished himself with a military career, he chose to return to his farm when the crisis was over. And so, his name came to symbolize the ideal "citizen soldier."

So, in this country, when the Revolutionary war was over, George Washington and other generals saw themselves in the same situation: they would now return to civilian life. They called themselves The Society of the Cincinnati (Latin plural of Cincinnatus!)

One of those generals was Anthony Wayne, who founded the city on the Ohio River which eventually got named Cincinnati.

@DrWatson love this. I prefer sticking to my Ancient Greek studies, but sometimes the Romans shine too brightly and break my prejudice up a bit 😋

@DrWatson I think we share at least one hobby.

@Sirsnowman 😀😀

@Mamapolo2016 My hobbies are largely nerdy! So, I decided to pursue this further to try to figure out the story behind the single n and the double n. According to my Latin dictionary, the word for curly hair in Latin is cincinnus. The word cincinnatus is an adjective meaning "having curly hair". (A lot of Roman family names came from a specific trait of an ancestor. )

So why are the n's in cincinnus the way they are? Well, the word comes from a Greek word. The letter "c" is was originally the Greek "chi", and transcribing the other letters into our Roman alphabet, the Greek word for curly hair was cicinnos.

The Romans pronounced the letter c as a hard sound (similar to the Greek chi). I am guessing that ki-kinnus eventually got pronounced kin-kinnus, and so the official spelling became cincinnus. The adjective cincinnatus would follow from that.

Hopefully this amuses @Sirsnowman as well!