On Monday, I asked why we would bother studying a dead language like Latin. Well, it was sort of trick question: Latin isn’t dead at all.
Yes, it is worth studying to make your mind stronger; and it is worth learning because it is the language of our civilizational roots. But it is also worth knowing, because it is incredibly useful. From law, to medicine, to meteorology, and on and on—Latin still is the language of many professions and fields of knowledge.
When you graduate from law school, you get a Juris Doctorate degree—Latin for a doctor of the law. You learn that to commit a crime, you must have a mens rea—a guilty mind, meaning that you were bad on purpose; that ex post facto laws are impermissible—that is, you can’t make a law after the fact and arrest someone for breaking the law before it was enacted.
When you graduate from medical school, you receive a Medicinae Doctor degree—you are a doctor of medicine. You learn that our tiny blood vessels are called capillaries because they resemble hair, which in Latin is capillaris. And when someone dies, rigor mortis sets in—meaning stiff death—when the limbs and joints harden.
And when you become a meteorologist, you may report on the upcoming solar eclipse—solar from the Latin sol (for sun); or on the big, puffy cumulus clouds in the sky—from the Latin cumulus, meaning heap.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking rigor mortis has set in for the Latin language. That would be a grave error—(by the way, that’s from the Latin errare, meaning to stray, as in stray from the truth).
Have a wonderful day.
