concept
Aut mortuis nihil bene
aut mortuis nihil bene
also: de mortuis nil nisi bonum
A garbled Latin tag Zapoykin tosses off to excuse himself for having just insulted the dead man -- a mangled echo of the genuine proverb "de mortuis nil nisi bonum" ("of the dead, [say] nothing but good"), part of the story's running joke about the gap between the orator's borrowed learned trappings and his actual command of Latin.
Reading notes
- The Orator §8 aut mortuis nihil bene
Zapoykin's garbled Latin -- the genuine proverb is "de mortuis nil nisi bonum" ("of the dead, [say] nothing but good") -- undercuts his own reputation for eloquence: even his scrap of borrowed classical learning is mangled, foreshadowing that his grand funeral rhetoric a few paragraphs later will be similarly unmoored from the actual facts.