Another story from Caird about Dodd's work on the NEB is that he went to a
slaughter house and asked what they would call a calf that was slaughtered
for a roasting. They replied, "a fatted calf." Hence, the NEB has "the
fatted calf."
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I was very pleased to learn that:
(a) The slaughterhouse folk had been reading their King James
Version of the Bible, and used it to form their technical terminology.
(b) The NEB translators had not looked at the King James Version
of Luke, but used slaughterhouse workers' speech as their English lexicon!
I had always believed that it was W. H. Auden who thought up "fatted calf."
Stories about Dodd have been told to me by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, emeritus
Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford; none of them bear repeating, nor
do his stories about his colleagues at Christ Church. But his stories are
spell-binding! Sir Hugh seems to have rather liked Dodd, without that
exempting Dodd from the barbed wit of a very great Greek scholar.
Edward Hobbs
Wellesley