The hortatory subjunctive in the movies

Anne, a classics major, wrote a poem in which she imagined what it would be like if she and her professor were together in the Aeneid . Uh-oh. And a student looking to punish that professor because of a low grade saw the poem, took it as drawn from life, and reported it. From Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2009):

Anne: “So I was in the library, and Mark Loeb read it over my shoulder.”

Bill: “He sight-translated it?”

Anne: “He was really good. It had, like, five hortatory subjunctives.”

Tim Blake Nelson was a classics major. I wasn’t, but the hortatory subjunctive was the stuff of a memorable moment in my grad-student life: Hortatory subjunctive FTW.

[The subtitles have Lobe , but the name must be a joke on the Loeb Classical Library. I’ve spelled accordingly.]