No, no, no! Latin is
good!
Mr. Vargas, you suck.
You got my Latin-loving hopes up and I feel like I was taught
wrong.
Let me explain. Mr. Vargas was my seventh grade English teacher. He wore polyester, drove a banana yellow corvette and he taught English. Now, this was before they called it "Language Arts", before there were any ESL classes, before IB classes and before reading and English were separate classes. You took English. Only English. And you learned about the English language. We conjugated our little 7th grade hearts out! For what seemed like hours and hours I'd work on my homework. I'd write essays and decode poetry and take furious notebooks full of notes.
I am sure that this is where I learned to love the act of editing, which I still do today. While I never really connected personally with Mr. Vargas, he certainly shaped my life. I remember his name and it's been twenty years.
Back to the matter at hand.
Naomi, my friend/employee/co-worker/desk mate is a
documentary freak. She is full of
knowledge that she likes to spout all over me.
It’s like a brain vomit every time she starts the conversation off with
“So, I watched this documentary…” This
is usually followed by “last night” cause apparently she goes through
withdrawal if she doesn’t watch at least an hour of informational programming
each night.
Today, we were talking about languages. No idea how we got on the subject. Naomi says that “English is a
Germanic language.”
My immediate response was, “Nuh uh! It’s derived from Latin roots!”
She went on to explain that what we know as English is
actually Germanic with some Latin thrown in after Normandy (north France)
invaded England. She speaks very
intelligently on the subject for a minute and my only response was, “Then why’d
I spend my entire 7th grade learning Latin roots from Mr. Vargas,
with all the prefixes and postfixes?
Seriously, the whole year in English class I memorized that shit.”
She went on to explain all intelligently and crap. Grrr..
Eventually I turned around in my chair and said “I’m going
to need to look this up.” I was in a
huff! So, I looked it up and, turns out,
she’s right. Damn it.
Not that I begrudge her being right. She usually is. The woman knows more about raising pandas in
captivity (the keepers dress in panda suits and rub panda poo all over themselves
in order not to confuse the baby pandas!) and the different biomes of Canada
(the first nation’s people burned down the maple trees and seeded streams with
salmon eggs.) Seriously, she’s a font of
knowledge.
Anyway, I found almost exactly
what she was saying about the language here.
Pisses me off. Like I told her,
“German is an ugly (hkughk, svien, lkaflkj – yes, I actually made those sounds)
language! I don’t want to think that the
language I speak is derived from something so yucky!”
The conclusion I’ve come to (in my head) is that there are just
too many similarities between English, Spanish and French for me to
ignore. I think I’ll continue to live in
my Latin-loving bubble. And continue to edit, because I love it.
This was originally posted on my blog on April 21st. Click the link if you'd like to read more!
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