At lunch today, my colleagues and I were sharing our experiences with foreign language instruction in high school.
“I jumped around too much,” I admitted. “Two years of Spanish, one year of French, and one year of Latin.”
Latin? Everyone was intrigued. It sounded so cultivated.
“Well, I was really into English, and one of my teachers told me that learning Latin would help me master English grammar.” (Partly true. In fact, I was avoiding Spanish 3 after barely making it through Spanish 2. And I thought it would be super cool to speak a dead language.)
Did a lot of people take Latin?
“There were about 8 people in my class, and it was the only Latin class. One guy wanted to be pharmacist, I remember, and I think he convinced 2 of his friends to join him.” (All 3 of them were huge druggies, and even Mr. Duffy, the stern yet jocular teacher, knew it. When he was giving examples of abstract nouns, he said “I couldn’t put a pound of ‘speed’ on this desk. Though I’m sure some of you could.”)
Was it helpful?
“Well, not really. It was very difficult and I have retained nothing. The thing you have to realize about Latin is that its vocabulary stopped evolving a long time ago. So while everyone else was in French class learning to talk about their favorite hobbies, we were learning words like ‘pillage,’ ‘lay siege,’ ‘set fire.’ But then again, no learning is wasted, right?” (Total BS. Since I am totally unable to conjure a single rare Latin phrase, I don’t even have full bragging rights.)
