This is the mixed media blog of James Foreman. He writes things.

Favorite topics include art, history, modern life, pop culture, dating, sex, atheism, science, stories, whimsy, magic, writing and self-deprecation.

You can read a fiction story he wrote in the bestselling Machine of Death anthology, a true story he wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or a funny thing he wrote for McSweeney's.

He's working on a novel. It's going okay.

Audentes Fortuna Iuvat

My family goes back a long way. Everybody’s family goes back a long way, of course, since we’re all descended from the same nascent eukaryotes of billions of years ago, but the main difference between my family and perhaps that of the neighborhood wolf spider is that we kept records.

For instance, one of the foremost names in my family is McKennan. Like most fancy Scottish clans, ours has a fancy latin motto, Audentes Fortuna Iuvat. My dearest Aunt Posy, who died nearly a year ago, bore that saying on her keychain, which I now have.

The phrase has widely entered the popular lexicon as a saying you might know - Fortune Favors the Brave. But that’s not really what it means.

Fortuna is right - it means “fortune.” We get the English version from the Latin word, as you can see. And iuvat means “favors.” But “brave?”

The Latin word for brave is fortis - it is the root for English words like fortitude and fortress.

Brave is not the right word at all for the McKennan family motto - Fortune Favors the Brave has its own Latin phrase: Fortes Fortuna Iuvat.

Audentes, like so many Latin words, has English descendants, like “audacious.” And this is where we see the difference. To my mind, the difference is HUGE.

An accurate translation of my family’s motto is Fortune Favors the BOLD. Boldness is an altogether different attribute from bravery.

Bravery is good for surviving things, for withstanding hardship, for facing great odds or for suffering and surpassing.

But where bravery is standing one’s ground, boldness is stepping forward. Audacious people take risks. They pioneer. They take action.

I find strength in this old Latin phrase, not because it has some kind of mystical power but because those ancestors of mine fought and survived and lived and acted boldly. They found strength in that phrase, too, because of its truth and its relevance - fortune DOES favor the bold, because nothing happens if you don’t take risks.

It’s all too easy in this world to fall back on electronic crutches and wither from society and responsibility and experimentation. Being brave is safe and passive.

But my ancestors did bold things, and because of those bold things, I am here to remember them.

The least I can do, as a way of thanking them, is take a few audacious risks of my own.

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