Magister, te saluto
I am one of the fortunate generation that received an education which was based on a a mature curriculum. Yes, I studied Latin. Over a five year period, I mentally wrestled, in the finest Greco-Roman sense, with five (six!) noun declensions and four verb conjugations, plus irregularities, while carrying on my real career of adolescence. Just for the sake of it: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative (let’s pretend the locative doesn’t exist)
My contact with Latin started very early, when a priest poured water on my head while praying softly for my soul. I learned my prayers in two languages, so that Vatican II did not mark me indelibly, as had baptism (’tis the truth; the nuns told us so) . By the time I arrived in Grade Nine, Latin was as familiar as …
I want to pause here and wish my congratulations to one of my Latin teachers, Verla Hall. She has just retired from a career in education that spanned 1969-2006, in the service of a dwindling population of Latinophiles. She arrived to take the deskspace of Big Bill Sirman who decided that law was more personally valid than teaching, and who warned us not to drop the subject simply because he was leaving (the Big may have been in regard to ego, rather than physical size)…
Anyhow, Miss Hall (we had suspected her name was Verla, but such things were not among the truths revealed to the student caste in those long ago times) took over and breathed new life into the discipline. She rebuked my free translations. She showed us that Latin was all around us (and still is, in a circumloquacious manner). She earned our respect. When it was time to declare my second language for the purposes of an application to university, Latin was sufficient and proper. When I decided to live in a second language, my Latin provided a foundation that has withstood the stormiest of times.
I believe she is the last of my high school teachers; all the others have retired. My congratulations to her! “Magister te saluto“.
