Sean Hannity quietly changed the cover of his new book after realizing its Latin motto was full of mistakes

• A new book by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity had the Latin motto on its front cover updated to remove mistakes.
• The change came after a student in Indiana pointed out that the attempted translation of "Live free or America dies" was so badly rendered that it did not make sense.
• Hannity had boasted about the motto on his Fox News show earlier this year, seemingly unaware of the mistakes.
• Between then and its publication on Tuesday, the motto was replaced with a correct Latin phrase.

Fox News anchor Sean Hannity's new book had the incorrect Latin motto on its front cover quietly altered after a student in Indiana pointed out the error.

"Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink" is released Tuesday, and has already topped some best-selling lists.

Its Amazon blurb characterizes the book as a description of "America's fight against those who would reverse our tradition of freedom," and warns of "full-blown socialism" and economic collapse if President Donald Trump loses the 2020 presidential election.

To top off its sense of urgency and tradition, the book cover includes a line of Latin underneath an image of a tattered US flag.

However, the original version of the five-word motto was full of mistakes.

A March 6 video on Hannity's website, taken from his Fox News show, shows him promoting the book. The cover has the incorrect motto: "Vivamus vel libero perit Americae."

Unaware of the mistakes, he told viewers: "The Latin at the bottom says 'Live free or America dies.'"

Hannity was corrected some time later by Spencer Alexander McDaniel, a Classics major at Indiana University Bloomington. McDaniel pointed out the errors in a May blog post, which called the motto "complete and utter gobbledygook."

He continued: "The words in Hannity's motto are real Latin words, but, the way they are strung together, they don't make even a lick of sense."

Latin, unlike English, has a vast system of grammatical forms for every word which dictates their meaning and relationship to each other.

In English, we know who is doing what in the phrase "Man bites dog" — as opposed to "Dog bites man" — because of order of the words. This logic does not apply in Latin, which has a flexible word order and derives its meaning from the grammatical form of each word.

For that reason, trying to turn something into Latin by translating each English word in turn will invariably not make sense.

McDaniel's best effort at making sense of the motto was "Let's live or he passes away from America for the detriment of a free man."

He also noted that the first Hannity motto is exactly what Google Translate returns for "Live free or America dies."

At some point later, the front cover was updated to fix the error.

Newer images — such as the one on its Amazon page — instead have a correct Latin phrase "Vivamus liberi ne America pereat," which means: "Let us live free so that America does not die."

The change came after posts by McDaniel and other classicists pointing out the error, which were shared hundreds of times on Twitter.

Business Insider has contacted Threshold Editions, the publisher of Hannity's book, to ask about the change.

Hannity is not the first to fall victim to poor translation. In 2014, a library in Moorestown, New Jersey, engraved incorrect Latin onto a stone wall before realizing its mistake.