Beyond these things

One of my clients has a joke-latin slogan they want on their business cards. I tried looking it up in the various Latin-to-English dictionaries on the Web, with no success. But while I was there, I thought about an intractable, supposedly Latin phrase that had been bothering me for a long time: the name of the rock group Procol Harum--you know, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"?

Anyway, their press materials used to say the name was a Latin phrase meaning "beyond these things."

It turns out that that's sort of right: Freedict's Latin-to-English dictionary gives "procul" (note the "u") as "far, at, to, from a distance." Used this way, it's an adverb. "Harum" is "of these things." So "procul harum" is probably better translated as "of these faraway things."

If somebody asks you the question in Really Hard Trivia, though, they're looking for "beyond these things". Or else they're wanting to hear that it was the name of Keith Reid's drug dealer's Persian cat. But that's a different story.