The Importance of Latin in the Curriculum
My memories of Latin in high school are less than fond. I remember slouching in my chair, staring blankly at my desk as I tried to remember the form of the word agricola (farmer) in the ablative plural. Much of the class consisted of mundane activities like this. We translated endless Bible passages from Latin, translated what seemed like the entire body of Greek mythological literature, and read hundreds of lines from The Aneid, The Odyssey, and The Iliad. I signed up for Latin because I was considering going into medicine, and I had heard that doctors need to know Latin. As high school progressed, though, a medical career seemed less and less likely so it appeared I had no real use for Latin, except that I knew the meaning of phrases like carpe diem and semper ubi sub ubi (always wear underwear). When someone would ask me why I took Latin, I would either mumble something about how Latin is the foundation on which all modern languages are based, or I would laugh and agree with them that it was a waste of my time, and that it’s a dead language.
And it is a dead language, at least in spoken form. Regardless of what Dan Quayle thinks, Latin is not the official language of Latin America. Latin has dropped from being the language spoken by almost the entire known Western world to an obscure language known mainly in scholarly circles. After the fall of the Roman Empire to Germanic invaders in 476 AD, Latin began a shift from being the common tongue to a language used mainly by upper-class and learned people (Hammond 243). Because the Church used Latin extensively, it became, along with ancient Greek, “the sheath in which the sword of the Spirit is lodged,” as Martin Luth...
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...s managed to escape from the wrath of the approaching Greek army.
Works Cited
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In the novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien shares several different experiences during the Vietnam War that had a great impact on the soldiers that fought along side him and himself. Although not all the stories are connected to one another, some intertwine. Attempting to show the reader who he is then and who he is now throughout the book, O’Brien flips back and forth between the past and the present: sharing his experiences during the war and his current time being a post-war father. War takes a toll on a man in more ways than one. Many seek comfort in bringing personal items with them to battle to remember where they came from and what they have to look forward to when returning home.
Tim O’Brien wrote the novel The Things They Carried in 1990, twenty years after the war in Vietnam.In the novel,Obrien takes us through the life of many soliders by telling stories that do not go in chronical order. In doing so we get to see the physical and mental things the soldiers carry throughout the war in Vietnam.Yet the novel is more than just a description of a particular war. In the things they carried Tim O’Brien develops the characters in the book slowly, to show the gradual effect war has on a person. O’Brien shows this by exploring the life of Henry Dobbins, and Norman Bowker.
"The Things They Carried," is a fiction story-telling book about the Vietnam War by Tim O'Brien that describes the physical and emotional burdens the men carry not only during their time in Vietnam but also years after leaving the warfront. The book is a series of stories told with O'Brien as the main narrator. O'Brien tells of the journey he takes alongside his unit, revealing his fight for courage and decision to commit to the serving in the war. It is a groundbreaking meditation on war, memory, imagination and the redemptive power of storytelling.
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Antony Kamm ~ The Romans: An Introduction Second Edition, Published in 2008, pages 47, 93
Word Press editor. “An Analysis of Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’”. Word press. N.P., April 12,2013. Web. 17 Mar 2014.
...ca we don’t have the “Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, and Ministry of Plenty” (Orwell 8) we are slowly heading that direction. As time goes on and more technology advances, will the government be restricted? If we are heading in the path that we are on, America could be Oceana before we know it. Instead of the year 1984 George Orwell should have written 2084.
Charters, Ann & Samuel. Literature and its Writers. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. 137-147. Print.
Perkins, Geroge, and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
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4)Rosenstein, Nathan Stewart., and Robert Morstein-Marx. A Companion to the Roman Republic. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006. Print.
Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts. 4th Compact Ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2008, pp. 95-100.
Gegenheimer, Albert Frank. “Language in Two Recent Imaginary Voyages.” Modern Language Association 61.2 (2009): 601-603. Print.
Let’s go back to John Stuart Mills, he was a gifted individual, his father spent a lot of time educating him and teaching him Greek and Latin. By the age of 14 he mastered both Greek and Latin. In his tee...