Difference between revisions of "Ab initio - ab ovo - in medias res"

Latest revision as of 15:07, 4 September 2021

AB INITIO

The Latin phrase ab initio – pronounced IPA: / æb ɪn 'ɪ ʃɪ əʊ/ – means ‘from the beginning’, ‘from the start’. The phrase tends to be used in formal, administrative, or legal contexts, e.g., ‘The project made a number of false assumptions and was doomed ab initio’, ‘The new manager decided to redesign the programme ab initio’.

The phrase may also be used adjectivally, as in ‘This year the University is offering an ab initio course in Finnish’ (i.e., a course for complete beginners, one which assumes no previous knowledge of the language’).

In the sciences a calculation is said to be ab initio - here a better translation might be ‘from first principles’ - if it relies solely on basic and established laws of nature. (The expression is used in slightly different ways in different sciences: for the details you are advised to consult an appropriate text book.)

AB OVO

Another Latin expression - ab ovo (pronounced IPA: /æb ‘əʊ vəʊ/) - is also sometimes used to mean ‘from the beginning’, but it is of much less frequent occurrence than ab initio. Ab ovo means literally ‘from the egg’, and its use to mean ‘from the beginning’ derives from lines 148-149 of the Ars poetica (Art of Poetry) of the Roman poet, Horace:

    nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ouo;
    semper ad euentum festinat et in medias res.

(And he (Homer) does not begin (his account of) the Trojan War from the twin egg, but always hurries on to the outcome and into the middle of things.)

Ab ovo gemino (‘from the twin egg’) is a reference to the egg produced by Leda after her seduction and impregnation by Zeus, who had turned himself into a swan in the attempt to win her affections. It was from this egg that Helen and Polydeuces were born, and it was Helen’s flight to Troy with Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, that led to the Trojan War. So Horace’s point in these lines is that Homer’s account of the Trojan War in the Iliad does not ‘begin at the beginning’ with the birth of Helen but opens with the Greek army already before the walls of Troy.

Reflecting its use in the Ars poetica, the phrase ab ovo may be used in English in the context of story-telling and other forms of narration: telling a story ab ovo is telling it from the beginning, i.e., starting with the event which set in train the sequence of events which make up the story.

IN MEDIAS RES

The quotation from the Ars poetica contains another Latin expression which is still sometimes used in English: in medias res – pronounced IPA: / ɪn miː (or mɛ) dɪ æs reɪs/ - literally ‘into the middle of things’, i.e., ‘into the middle of the story’ or ‘into the thick of the action’. It is appropriately used when a writer or speaker, rather than ‘beginning at the beginning’, dispenses with an introduction or preliminary scene-setting and immediately launches into the thick of the action, only later providing the background or telling the reader about what has already happened.

Grammatical postscript: the phrase in medias res means ‘into the middle of things’, i.e., it presupposes a verb of movement: medias res is in the accusative case and so here the Latin preposition in means ‘into’ – as in the quotation from Horace: ‘Homer hurries on into the middle of things’. However, English speakers nowadays tend not to know, or not to respect, this point and so say, e.g., ‘I shall begin in medias res’, when they should, strictly speaking, say ‘I shall begin in mediis rebus’ - in here does not mean ‘into’ and so takes the ablative, not the accusative case.