After nearly meeting its demise after Dewey remade American education, Latin has been resuscitated by the Classical school movement — just “mostly dead” instead of “all dead.”
Granted, it’s not terribly practical. Unless you visit the Vatican, you’ll never speak Latin in your life. Unlike French and German, Latin students will never broach the subtle linguistic dilemma of “where is the bathroom?” The American-Roman embassy is not looking for diplomats. So what if a couple years of Latin demonstrably improves SAT scores and impresses grad schools? Is it really worth the pain of endless paradigms? Except for the deliciously ironic skill of learning to ask yourself why you bother using an indirect question, why study Latin?
Let’s get a few obligatory — and valid — reasons out of the way:
1) Latin is good for your brain. It’s an inflected language with a fairly regular grammar. No, it’s not “mathematic,” whatever that means, but you must approach it with a rigorous syntactic logic before you see the poetry. So what? Latin teaches a scrupulousness with language notably lacking in politics, advertising, and universities as well as my own field of study. And as an English major, even my history friends make jokes about literary analysis papers being B.S. And unfortunately they are often correct, as a quick flip through criticism in the Humanities Abstracts index reveals. But that’s because much of modern academia — and politics, for that matter — is more concerned with fabricating new combinations of scholarly doublespeak than it is with texts and authors (Cue: George Orwell). Latin demands that words be taken seriously, and that’s a habit of precision critical for lawyers, historians, politicians, and even ordinary people deciphering insurance policies and emails from their mothers-in-law.
2) You’ll appreciate great literature. Until very recently, writers knew Latin. Even Winnie the Pooh references Horace when he tries to distract Kanga while Rabbit kidnaps baby Roo in a scene of timeless hilarity. Reading Marilynne Robinson, arguably one of the greatest living American novelists and essayists, is a lot easier if you’re familiar with Ciceronian style. Flip through the pages of the journal Poetry, and you’ll find that America’s finest still take Virgil, Catullus, and Ovid as their muse (classicist and poet A.E. Stallings being a superb example). Even E.E. Cumming’s avant-garde poetry can be informed by a background in Latin. His “if feeling is first” feels like a Horatian carpe diem poem in all its foreboding and yet playful loveliness. Writers are notoriously allusive beings and Latin lies at the foundation of this tradition.
Forget the third point (something dull about scientific nomenclature and medicine). Forget psychology and education. The real reason you should learn Latin is for the sex — not that you’ll get more if you master the nuances of indirect speech (the gerund-gerundive two-step is not, unfortunately, a seductive dance-move, though Classics conferences allegedly put the Bacchus back in debauchery).
Latin literature has two themes: sex and violence. In comparison with the exploits and invectives of Catullus’s infamous poetry, gangster rap seems a bit uninspired. Why would you read tabloids when the escapades of Ovid’s gods transcend the steaminess even of the Kardashians? And you won’t get the innuendos if you read in translation. Under Horace’s tutelage, the cliché of “carpe diem” acquires a hilarity which will last through a lifetime of high school graduations: the moral poet’s advice in his famous Ode 10 is to dispel sorrow with wine and relish youth (enjoy responsibly). Judging by Horace’s lines to prostitutes, he seems to have reveled quite a bit in his own youth.
Study Latin for the simple-hearted pleasure of snickering over the parenthetically-labeled “rude” definitions in Whitaker’s Words; the number of naughty words is impressive.
Study Latin and keep your inner adolescent alive.