“Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life (Hyperion. 259 pages. $19.95), by Harry Mount
The Latin language, on life support for decades, got a brief reprieve when the world of Harry Potter introduced such words as “expelliaramus” — a spell to disarm an enemy — and Latin-sounding names like Remus and Albus.
But this kind of pop culture exposure does little to paper over the bad news: The 2,000-year-old tongue once common to most of the civilized world, not to mention the language of the Roman Catholic mass until about 50 years ago, is fading fast.
In 1960, as Mount relates in a warm and witty tribute, 60,000 British schoolchildren did Latin O levels — the basic exam for British 16-year-olds. Today, only 10,000 do a much more basic replacement. Even fewer go on to take Latin in upper levels of schools.
The picture is a little brighter in the United States, Mount says, where the number of children taking the National Latin Exam has soared in recent years. But the language is still almost nonexistent in schools and instead has migrated largely to universities and a small group of die-hard classics majors.
The question, of course, is, who cares? With few exceptions, Latin hasn’t been a spoken language for centuries. A basic grounding is helpful for science, law and spelling — and tracking the Hogwarts gang — but it’s hard to dispute the idea that schools’ scarce resources should be spent on teaching languages more relevant to today: Arabic, say, or Chinese.
Still, Mount makes a strong case for the study of Latin as a window into cultural, literary and archaeological history. Helping matters, he keeps it light, mixing humor and multiple pop culture references with heavier reflections on Latin and its legacy.
Who knew, for example, that soccer megastar David Beckham and actress Angelina Jolie share in common a penchant for Latin tattoos? Jolie gets a mention for a Latin phrase on her pregnant belly, “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (“What nurtures me destroys me”).
Of Beckham’s nine tattoos, Mount reports, three are in Latin, including the phrase “Ut Amem et Foveam” on his left forearm, or, “That I might love and cherish.”
Along the way, we get a short history of the appearance of togas on college campuses thanks to the 1978 movie “Animal House” and the toga popularized by Blutus Blutarsky, the character played by the late John Belushi.
Mount also manages to squeeze in references to “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Star Trek” and novelist Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter.
There’s also a brief stop by Monty Python, remembered for the scene in “Life of Brian” where a Roman centurion played by John Cleese corrects the poor Latin of graffiti-writing Brian. We also learn of the popularity of Ista, a German hip-hop band that raps in Latin.
Keeping it relevant to real life, Mount recalls the phrase “annus horribilis,” or horrible year, coined by Queen Elizabeth to describe her 1992, “a bloody terrible year, when Windsor Castle burned down, and the marriages of Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne fell apart.”
A little bookish trivia doesn’t hurt, either. Dominoes, it emerges, come from the word “dominus,” or master, and the dark cloaks these medieval lords wore with holes cut into them for eyes. Hence, the dark blocks with white dots. Neat.
If those lighter references are the ornaments of the book, its limbs are several tables devoted to the tough stuff: vocabulary lists, the declension of nouns, rules for the subjunctive.
As jokey as Mount likes to be, he doesn’t skirt the rigor required to learn Latin. And he does his best to drive home his argument that Latin does matter, even now.
“Knowing a bit of Latin is an invitation to the biggest room in the building, with a view down the corridor to all the succeeding ages,” he writes.
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