I think my kids always think I'm irredeemably weird when I trot out the Latin roots of words that come up as vocabulary in the day-to-day scheme of things. "How on earth does she know that?" is probably one of the few things that pop into their minds, along with "Why would we ever need to know this?" and "She's making that up."
But it was the Latin that made a word-hound out of me, and it was the Latin that enabled me to understand the concept of declensions, giving me a head start amongst my Old English classmates, and Latin is fabulous for doing the crossword!
They still teach it at my school, but the classes tend to average about 6 people. This year I have a student in my grade 11 class who is one of those 6, and *she* is the one who gets all the neat language stuff that makes the others squint fitfully at the etymological scribbles on the blackboard. Yay for her!! Maybe one day *she'll* get to go study in Venice for a season!
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Date: 2003-10-22 10:04 pm (UTC)But it was the Latin that made a word-hound out of me, and it was the Latin that enabled me to understand the concept of declensions, giving me a head start amongst my Old English classmates, and Latin is fabulous for doing the crossword!
They still teach it at my school, but the classes tend to average about 6 people. This year I have a student in my grade 11 class who is one of those 6, and *she* is the one who gets all the neat language stuff that makes the others squint fitfully at the etymological scribbles on the blackboard. Yay for her!! Maybe one day *she'll* get to go study in Venice for a season!