What is Carpe Piscem?
I was an odd high schooler, never wanting to be seen as average, always trying to push my brain further into realms of knowledge but never wanting to seem to flighty and without common sense. That being the case, Latin was my choice of foreign language studies, a choice never regretted though it was a difficult and, at times, torturous journey. You may have heard the Latin phrase “carpe diem” meaning “seize the day” literally, and through the morphing of idiom it has taken on the meaning of “take full advantage of the opportunities that life has given you.”
Carpe Piscem hearkens back to that familiar phrase, but naturally builds on it as well. Those with sharp eyes, and perhaps an astrological bent, have probably noticed that “piscem” looks a lot like Pisces the fish zodiac constellation. Indeed, piscem is a form of the Latin word meaning “fish.” Literally then, Carpe Piscem, means “sieze the fish.”
CP is a semi-nonsense phrase a friend of mine and I came up with in high school to describe how we would course our lives from then on. The “carpe” half pointing to the older more established “carpe diem.” We would take life seriously, living without regrets, conscious of and deliberately focusing on excellence with whatever we did.
But the “piscem” half we saw as just as important. To the modern eye, the image of someone grabbing for fish with their bare hands is one of almost pure humor. If anything, you can’t be dignified when you’re slouching over the surface of a pond, knee deep in muddy water trying to grasp and grab a slippery fish. So where “carpe” meant for taking life seriously, “piscem” came to show that we could not take ourselves seriously.
There was always a time and place where a pretense of dignified professionalism and having all the answers would be more harmful than playful child-like wonder. Sometimes you just have to dust yourself off and laugh.
When it comes to my writing especially, the philosophy of Carpe Piscem comes to play with a bouncy sort of elegance in word choice and sentence construction, pulling the reader into the content but with style and timbre that I would hope encourages thinking and smiling.