Are you trying to write like an educated Sarah Palin?
This post would be cool if it was in Latin. Sadly, it is not.
I leave all of the Latin-speaking up to my sister.
There was an annual Latin banquet at my high school (mutter mutter) years ago. It wasn't restricted to the kids in Latin, though - I was taking German and went as a barbarian (and had lots of fun behaving "uncivilized").
rather than because I was under the impression that doing so would make me> cool
I think we can all agree that w-lfs-n is not > cool, but rather somewhat less than.
What are the odds that this article was prompted by the author's son/daughter/cousin signing up for Latin in Scarsdale? I put the odds at somewhere north of 65%.
Seniors serve bread, olives, roasted chicken and grapes to younger students, and all of them break bread with their hands.
This is cute, but it would be so much more impressive if they served dormice with honey, and a an enormous sow sewn up with live pigeons and surrounded by little suckling piglets made of pastry.
I've been working my way backward in time with historical recipes (medieval England was a success, and I'm eagerly anticipating fxcuisine's blancmange recipe), but imperial Rome has me stuck. Wikipedia implies that nam pla would be an acceptable substitute for liquamen, but I can't be sure what passum should taste like and what I could use in its place.
Latin population at our school was home to the coolest of the cool.
By this you mean that we can safely discount your entire high school experience from having any relevance to the that of the average high school student, right?
8 - I would love to try dormice. Also chaffinches eyebrows.
Why are so many high school Latin teachers pervs? Mine was fond of telling the boys in class to get the girls on a boat, because girls lose all their morals on a boat. CA's Latin teacher (at ogged's super honky high school) was a flamboyant gay man who used to chase the girls around his desk crying "Give teacher a kiss!" and promising A's to whichever of them would show up to class in a "monokini."*
I've seen speeches given in Latin. I speak no latin whatsoever, but a friend who was sitting beside me and is a Roman historian told me that the speech was both very witty and in perfect Latin.
Also, the Latin teacher at my school was also a mild perv. He was very young, incredibly nerdy, and totally in thrall to the more domineering girls.*
* I didn't study Latin, but he doubled up teaching other things.
I don't think this guy was very pervy.
Maybe he just wasn't that into you, Ben.
My high school classic department (Latin and Greek, peasants) would annually stage a play by one of The Ancients in Latin. Period costumes, natch. Plautus, usually. Some things don't need translation.
I think that our school there were 5 or 6 kids (out of roughly 300 in the year) who took Latin to Higher level [rough equivalent to the English 'A' level]. This was about as many who took Engineering Science.
Neither were characterised by 'coolness.'
Some things don't need translation.
Thankfully, some things don't need attending (unless you're the poor bastard with a kid in the production)
I can't be sure what passum should taste like and what I could use in its place.
In its place? But wikipedia gives you Columella's account of the recipe right there! (It also suggests that Passito might be an appropriate substitute.)
My high school Latin club had a banquet. It was definitely not cool, and I have pictures to prove it. And our teacher conducted class almost completely in Latin--with what I much later came to regard as highly questionable latinity--beginning with roll call on the first day ("Quis habet nomen...?"). This is not a sound strategy for learning to read a dead language. No evidence of her being a perv, though.
I don't see how the asterisked note in 13 relates to 12, or it could be a clever sort of collaboration.
I can't be sure what passum should taste like and what I could use in its place.
Weasel, skunk, squirrel.
The Greek majors of a college near where I used to live would put on mashups of Greek plays and TV shows. My favorite was the mashup of the original Star Trek with Iphigenia at Aulis.
8, 21: ortolan
and it is passer (mortuus est meae puellae).
I think I posted this before in an old thread- the highlight of one Latin class was translating a woman's plea for mercy, asking why her husband was so mean, as, "Master, why are you so hard?"
The most inappropriate joke in HS was actually told by the law teacher, but on a classical topic- "How did they separate the men from the boys in ancient Rome?"
You guys had law and Latin at your high schools? How un-American. My high school offered: arithmetic and readin the Scriptures. We did have auto shop.
I would like to admit here that last night I spontaneously made a really jaw-droppingly filthy joke while teaching. Like bad. And I should be fired for it.
The Classics concentrators at Harvard now have a Latin table where they speak in Latin. Sadly, this was unavailable when I was a student. It's lasted, because the department springs for their dinner at Bertucci's.
AWB, we'll need to hear that joke, please.
But it'll seem filthier if we never find out what it was!
28: Probably half your students have a giant crush on you now.
My friend John has great stories from taking Father Reginald's spoken Latin class in Rome. (Lots of folks have done this. As far as I understand it, it's free and open to anyone who knows enough Latin to benefit from it.) He says he got to the point where he would spontaneously switch from Italian (or English) to Latin if something put him in mind of the class. Like, walking past the bar they all hung out in, he turned to his companion and asked, "Estne Reginalis in tavena?"
I took Latin in the early 60s; my HS teacher led us in anti-war demonstrations in Latin. [Some against Viet Nam, some against various Caesarian incursions.] And there was the "Titus Labienus proditor est" protest sign that graced the door.
Whew! I came within an ace of thinking that the Latin word was really "tavena"! That could have been socially embarrassing.
In taverna quando sumus non curamus quid sit humus, or so they say.
30: It would take a lot of contextualization, in that there would be several hundred pages of required reading.
31: Exactly. I did repeat it to my girlfriend afterward, and she was horrified, if that's any indication.
32: No, I promise, it was way too anatomical (and sort of gross) to be crush-inducing. Girlfriend's response, after, "Oh. My. GOD" was, "Well, they, uh, won't look at you the same way anymore," but I don't think she meant in a crushy way.
AWB, what is it that you want from us?
This is pretty funny. (Sadly fake.) Dr. B should appreciate it.
38: If it requires several hundred pages of reading which can't be summarized, it's not dirty, it's elitist.
42: Sadly, all British Literature surveys are elitist. If they're worth taking, they're also dirty.
I, for one, am willing to do several hundred pages of reading to get to the dirty joke.
My Latin teacher wasn't a perv. She did supposedly write science fiction on the side, but she wouldn't tell anyone what name she wrote under.
32: Half of AWB's students already have a crush on her.
46: Almost all of them, in that class, are middle-aged women, FWIW. Crushes, perhaps!
Ya know, come to think of it, my Latin teacher probably resembled the illegitimate love child of W-lfs-n and DeLong. Which was not a bad thing, exactly, but those classes rather lacked in cock jokes.
Anyways, having the chick in front of me doing the coke the football player had passed to her was enough entertainment in its own right.
max
['Not a cool distraction.']
"I have to say I think it's super cool that people in some of these schools are actually composing and speaking a bit in Latin; I only ever approached that level of comfort once, after a prose class in college, and it made the other aspects, as you would expect, much easier. "
Is composition not standard in the US, then? You had to do it for GCSE in England when I took it (13 years ago, admittedly).
Aut mortuus est, aut docet litteras: Erasmus, "adages".
Someone else who took HS Latin? I never thought I would meet such a person, or at leat one who would admit it.
My HS was in a poor district so we got all the starter teachers, which was actually pretty good, at least if you were a horny teen-aged boy.
Yeah, first year my HS Latin teacher was fresh out of college and a hottie. I learned so much I stuck with it second year and coasted through when the teacher was replaced with someone much less hott. The good teachers left after a year for greener pastures.
Skip ahead to Sr year and the new orchestra director. Yeah, massive crush time. That taught me to memorize the music so I could keep an eye on the conductor.
I suppose what culture I have is due to the influence of hott women.
Is composition not standard in the US, then?
Not in my experience, in high school.
That's a shame. It's a lot more fun than translation, and gives you a better appreciation of things like prose/verse style.
54:
Maybe so, but my humble attempts at Latin composition were stuck at the "Publius et Secunda (went to the) forum Romanum" level. Well, that and the doggerel Semper Ubi Sub Ubi and Irrumpe te.
my acquaintance with Latin is limited to the first year of med school when we were taught anatomy, the first class ever was all costae, vertebrae and foramen, we were 17-18 yo, so yeah, it was like American HS maybe, the first yr
but not much learning of the ancient texts, though the latin classes were taught separate
i remember the Gaudeamus song on the last page of the Latin notebook
then we were taught during pharmacology classes the third yr i think how to write correctly recipes like Recipe: Tincturae whatever 5.0ml etc all, even how to use is written in Latin abbreviations
very obsolete, in practice nobody writes it like that now ime
dormice with honey
FORBIDDEN.
41's fake? Crap. Someone emailed it to me, and I was *so* hoping it suggested that the next generation of Palins, at least, wouldn't suck.
You know an amazing amount of stuff, Read.
oh, thank you, JE, no, not really, of course, all that tincturae, tabulettae Latin stuff i already forgot
i thought you've mistaken someone else
our system is after Russian, so people graduate MDs at 22-23, too early an age to start killing people imo ;)
i doubt what one really learns like for real when one's 17-18, memory is very fine of course till the exams maybe, then there are too many distractions etc
if i ever will have any voice in that kind of decision making, i'd try to push to switch to the American system of medical education
My daughter just got into Cambridge to read Latin. Not that I feel the urge to talk about this in front of strangers or anything.
Contraceptive properties duly noted.