Forgery
One who studies the career of forgery in the West may well wonder if the human mind nourishes a deep-seated desire to be taken in as grandly and as thoroughly as possible. Muntus fuld tezibi — ‘the world wants to be fooled’ — is after all the motto on the title page of one of the greatest of all exposés of scholars’ propensity to be fooled, J. B. Menke’s orations On the Charlatanry of the Learned” – Anthony Grafton, Forgery and Critics, Princeton University Press
I wondered what language Muntus fuld tezibi might be. It sounds like something John Dee might have mentioned in a spell book! But the answer is simple enough: the actual frontispiece says “Mundus vult decipi”, which is perfectly good Latin. I had my doubts at first, but Claude explains plausibly that decipi is the passive infinitive of “decipio, decipere, decepi, deceptus”. I don’t think Latin III got that far.
But fuld tezibi?