ROME WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY — Sharon Mark Cohen

From where did the adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day” originate? I did what our children do and looked it up on the internet.

According to Wikipedia, “‘Rome wasn't built in a day’ is an adage attesting to the need for time to create great things. It is the usual English translation of a medieval French phrase, Rome ne fu[t] pas faite toute en un jour, from the collection Li Proverbe au Vilain, published around 1190.[1] The modern French form is «Rome ne s'est pas faite en un jour».

“The expression, (as "Rome was not built in one day") is given in English in John Heywood's A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue (c. 1538),[2] while Queen Elizabeth I referred to the idea in Latin in an address at Cambridge in 1563.[3] The present perfect and oratio recta version of the Latin saying—the version one would use for a stand-alone quotation—would be Roma uno die non est condita.

“The phrase was used in the title of a 1964 song Sam Cooke [4] also covered by British singer Anne Shelton in 1962.[5]”

No more going for an alphabetized book from the Encyclopedia Britannica collection, which I still remember my mother buying from the insurance salesman who came to our apartment in Roselle, New Jersey. No running around the house trying to find the less expensive brand books filled with colorful pictures that she collected the first volumes of for free at the supermarket. I remember, as if it were yesterday, our mother bringing them home, especially to my brother Stu’s delight, as he read them page by page, sopping up every bit of the information. No wonder he guesses so many of the Jeopardy questions before the contestants.

Not even the almanac gets used these days, except maybe still by my brother Al, a non-believer in the computer age. What a lot of room those hefty bearers of information took up with their thick lot of pages.

Those old relics are currently lining shelves in my husband’s study. Some day, our children can throw them out. Maybe they’ll pick them up and flip through them first. Probably not. For now, they sit on display, and, as my mother would say, they’re not hurting anyone by being there.

When was the last time you opened a fact-filled publication with descriptive pictures? Now, go to the internet to look up “encyclopedia” and “almanac” and add those words to your lexicon. Hurry, computer space is being swallowed up by all the "information" no longer suitable for print.

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That brings me to the subject at hand. It’s barbeque season, which brought back a long-ago memory. In that regard, I plan to look up one of my Uncle Jerome’s favorite sayings, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”* I cannot escape the image of me as a teen and my uncle trying to get me to eat a steak that he grilled rare and tried to hand over to me to eat with the blood still dripping. I shuddered and ran as he shouted after me his famous, When in Rome...

My mother cooked everything well-done for us, as did my father when he grilled. While our mother was in the hospital undergoing surgery, my brother Stu and I were farmed out. That was in the 1960s, and we were at our aunt and uncle’s house in Hillside, New Jersey, not in Rome, I reasoned.

Our dear Uncle Jerome, who enlisted and served in the Seabees in WWII (I looked it up on the internet and found: United States Naval Construction Battalions, better known as the Navy Seabees, form the U.S. Naval Construction Force. The Seabee nickname is a heterograph of the initial letters "CB" from the words "Construction Battalion") was winding down from his day at work at the Newark Post Office. There he stood in his backyard wearing shorts and a t-shirt while grilling steaks—rare.

By the way, while my cousin Norman, two years my junior, ate it the way his father served it, blood dripping down his arm, my aunt agreeably took my side and hollered out to my uncle to grill mine longer. The thought of Norman’s melodic hearty laughter at my disgust of the scene reverberates. Oh, the memories. You can’t get those from books or the computer!

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*Sharing from Wikipedia, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”

“From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do[1] (Medieval Latin sī fuerīs Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre; sī fuerīs alibī, vīvitō sīcut ibī; often shortened to when in Rome...),[2] or a later version when in Rome, do as the Pope does,[3] is a proverb attributed to Saint Ambrose. The proverb means to follow the traditions or customs of a place being visited.

“Saint Monica and her son, Saint Augustine, discovered that Saturday was observed as a fast day in Rome, where they planned to visit. However, it was not a fast day where they lived in Milan. They consulted Saint Ambrose who said "When I am here (in Milan) I do not fast on Saturday, when in Rome I do fast on Saturday." That reply is said to have brought about the saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."[4][5]”

Now, have a steak the way you like it. If it’s the same as my preference in steak these days, cauliflower steak, done just right, there should be no dripping blood involved.