Vae Motoris
by JimmyTard
>>24452505
You were my top choice, JimmyTard—those of us who gave their story a Latin title need to stick together.
However, your Latin composition gets an F from me!
Within, you wrote:
>Vae Victis: woe to the conquered.
>Vae Motoris: Woe to the road
I will break down the common phrase first, which you copied correctly:
“Victīs” used here is a perfect-passive-participle substantive—the adjective “the conquered”—in the dative case—“to.”
>https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/victus#Participle
“Victīs” is also plural, but English doesn’t really accomodate/differentiate PPP-substantives in this way—“the conquereds?”—so detail is lost when translating to English.
I’m assuming you were going for symmetry between the common phrase and your construction, so I’ll point out that “to the roads” PLURAL would make more sense here.
Now, onto the word you chose for “road,” “mōtōris”…where to begin.
“Mōtōris” is a singular noun—just like the word “road”—but it’s in the genitive case, and is the wrong word entirely for “road.”
>https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/motor#Declension_4
“Mōtōris,” in the genitive case, roughly translates to “of the driver”—this is not even close to “Woe to the road.”
If you were going for “to the driver,” then “mōtōrī;” if “to the drivers,” then “mōtōribus.”
Via metonymy, you basically meant the “drivers” on top of the road when you wrote “road” here, so there’s an argument mōtōrī/mōtōribus is all you need, but let’s get the right word for road anyway:
“Via.”
>https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/via#Declension
Now just find the dative in the declension chart, and you can pick singular, or plural if you want to match with “victĪS”—
>Vae vaie --> Woe to the road.
>Vae vaiīs --> Woe to the roads.
Either one is beautiful, in my opinion, especially because of how similar “via” and “vae” are to one another.
You’ll notice all the Latin words I wrote above have mācrōns where Wiktionary tells me they should go, and if you want to go the extra mile, like, if your MC actually knows-knows Latin, then I’d include them, but for a pseud—like the MC in my story—I might choose to omit them.

I drive for a total of 2 hrs every day I work.
I can’t critique real life, now can I?
More submissions need the white-knuckled whimsy you embued your story with; “Rorschach’s-journal” entries over a traffic-jam really lightened the oppressive mood of this batch of stories.
Probably what I love most about it as a whole are the stakes—they’re low, but also deceptively high…
If the arteries (“vaiens?”) which aquaduct our civilization back-and-forth clog up, what do we have left?
I guess we get the trees we get our clogs from.
Picking just one, this was my fav line:
>The tree smiles back, for he’s seen this image hundreds of times
I’ll be with the gooses one day, I know it.
HONK!