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The National Catholic Reporter, a generally liberal Roman Catholic newspaper published in the US but with a worldwide circulation via the Internet, published a column today by a professor named Eugene Cullen Kennedy. The column deals with the meeting between Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict XVI. In this column was the paragraph:

For the queen, who once publicly admitted to having an anus horribilis -- a really bad year -- has seen the traditions of the royal family disrupted by more problems with love, estrangement, and loss than Shakespeare ever piled into a play. It is difficult for the queen to be a symbol of stability when she knows that her ‘sceptred isle’ may on any given day ripple with the aftershocks of royal misbehavior.

The bolded words, of course, would indicate perhaps that Her Majesty had difficulty in sitting down for a year; one is much much too refained to actually translate what the column says. However, confusion between anus and annus in Latin and their equivalents in some modern Romance languages is a genuine source of amusement for many and of embarrassment for a few.

I do hope that the column is corrected soon, as one would expect that a column written by a Roman Catholic in a Roman Catholic publication would ensure that Latin quotations were correct.