How to render "in being [something]" like: "I'm not fickle in being fickle"

Question

For fickle ventosus was chosen, but trying to render "being fickle" got me into trouble. I would like to use the "in + abl. gerunde" of sum but for some reason it is not in existence.

I was thinking of of cum (when), but for this kind of usage, cum seems not quite right because the idea is that I'm always a fickle. Another option was to have this by a clause:

Non ventosus sum in eo quod sum ventosus

But it feels, maybe unjustified so, heavy and complex.

In a question on this Forum for the motto "No virtue in being a humankind" Joonas offered the simple ablative of the noun (nulla virtus in humanitate), so that brings up the possibility of

non ventosus in mea ventositate

But I'm not sure it works here as good, as I want to keep the vividness/concreteness of being fickle. Not as a theoretical abstract notion.

So the question: what are the different ways to render "in being x"?

Answer 1

First off, as I've said in a comment, I think Ben Kovitz's suggestion of constanter inconstans is excellent, and the reasoning that led to it is spot-on. But that answer jogged a memory of something in Ovid, which I've now had time to track down. So, even though you've already considered (and discarded as insufficiently vivid) the approach of using in + an abstract noun, I'll point out that that's exactly the approach that Ovid used to render the very same idea of 'not fickle in being fickle.' In (Tristia 5.8.15-18), the narrator describes Fortune as follows:

passibus ambiguis Fortuna volubilis errat
et manet in nullo certa tenaxque loco,
sed modo laeta nitet, vultus modo sumit acerbos,
et tantum constans in levitate sua est.

'...and is constant/non-fickle only in her inconstancy/fickleness'

What I like about this is that Ovid avoids etymologically balancing the adjective constans with the noun inconstantia, which would be the obvious choice, but instead switches to the noun levitas. Although various factors no doubt contributed to this choice (e.g., the demands of the meter and perhaps the clunkiness of in inconstantia), the final effect can be seen to underscore his point in a manner that I find quite vivid and concrete in its own way: even a description of Fortune ends up having something unreliable/inconstant about it.

Answer 2

I don't think this answers your question, and it's probably wrong, too. I post it here to attract criticism and correction, which may lead someone to a good answer (or maybe another question).

Latina mente loqui?

I don't think Latin wants you to make constructions analogous to "in being fickle". Beyond Classical Latin's lack of participles for sum, I gather that Latin wants you to exploit its rich grammatical resources to express your proposition in a sentence where the ratio of words to important concepts is 1:1. There should be nothing mysterious or obscure about how your thought maps to your words. Seen from the Latin point of view, constructions like "in being fickle" are circumlocutions forced on you by the clumsy inflectional resources of an analytic language.

When you say "being fickle", a noun phrase, you don't mean a kind of thing that you can be "in". You mean something that you do, or the way that you are when you're doing it. You can always force a spatial analogy onto anything, but in this case that would obscure or mystify how your thought took form in words.

So, an adverb, maybe in a litotes:

Mihi nōn cōnstō nōn incōnstanter.

Better yet, not a litotes:

Cōnstanter incōnstō.

I made up the verb incōnstō so it might be poor Latin, but I think this is the right spirit. (Or "in the right spirit", you might say.)

More conventionally:

Cōnstanter incōnstāns sum.

Or, describing you with an adjective, naming your state as you act:

Cōnstāns errō.

That might be the clearest of all. Compare the directness of that to what it took to express the same thought in English: "I'm stable in my erratic behavior/attitudes towards things."