Ab ovo in political science, or how we are indebted to Horace

Recently I came across a Latin phrase ab ovo which means “from the egg”. In literature it is the practice of beginning of a narrative at the earliest possible chronological point. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the origin of the word can be traced back to Horace, who in his Ars poetica approvingly notes about Homer that he does not begin a tale of the Trojan War with the twin egg from which Helen was born but rather in the middle of events.

At University I had one professor in who’s arsenal ab ovo was the most frequently used WMD (“weapon of mass de-education”). His most famous use of ab ovo was when he was lecturing about OSCE, he started with Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-European Movement, paying no attention to the fact that between the emergence of these two things there are at least 50 years of interval, leaving aside all other differences!

As there was no enough place for all the students in the auditorium to sit comfortably, we three friends were sitting at one desk, which in theory was designed for two students, and comparing the minutes passed from the actual time and the years passing in the lecture of the Professor.

From time to time someone would say: “After ten minutes we are in 1950s”, the other would reply: “By this manner we are going to reach OSCE only at the end of the lesson!” And then the Professor would turn towards us and tell: “Young man, would you allow me to continue my lecture?”, that is, please shut up, and make no noise! Yeah, such a Gorchakov he is, instead of saying simply “Shut up”, he resorted to sesquipedalianism, or sözbazlıq to say in Azerbaijani.

One my friend who was religiously taking notes of his lectures, not omitting a word, at the end of each lesson was counting his “trademarks”, such as “it is not a coincidence that…”(TDK) and “it is obvious that…” (MOK), and etc and writing at the end of his lecture notes:

TDK……..12
MOK…….10
…………….
In total….. 31

Let me finish here without any further comment, otherwise I also run a risk being a sesquipedalian myself!

P.S.: By the way, the word sesquipedalian also was invented by Horace, who used phrase sesquipedalia which means “a word 15 centimeters in length”!!!