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[54] Such puns are more successful with things than names. It was, for example, a neat hit of Afer's when he said that Manlius Sura, who kept rushing to and fro while he was pleading, waving his hands, letting his toga fall and replacing it, was not merely pleading, but giving himself a lot of needless trouble.1 For there is a spice of wit about the word satagere in itself, even if there were no resemblance to any other word.

1 This pan cannot be reproduced. Watson attempts to express it by “doing business in pleading” and “overdoing it.” But “overdoing it” has none of the neatness of salagere, which is said to have “a spice of wit about it,” since it means lit. “to do enough,” an ironic way of saying “to overdo it.”

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