One place that Latin has really helped me was just recently in my AP Language and Composition class. In the book that we are reading right now: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Anne Dillard. Overall the novel is very hard to follow. There is truly no overarching plot and is mainly just her talking about things/events that she has experienced in nature over the period of a year. The only sense of time in the novel is just her mentioning what the seasons are. Other than its complicated nature, religion is an aspect of the novel as well. Where she also reflects on god and her own spirituality. While this does not seem to connect to Latin, the novel references many different roman ideas/philosophers as well as uses Latin. Our most recent study of Pliny helped me connect the way that Pliny writes to the way he describes his observations, which helped connect why she used Pliny to describe this short portion of the novel. She mentions Pliny letters and tells a story of his about a Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. For example, one of the actual Latin phrases that she uses ex nihilo, which means out of nothing. She uses Latin to help solidify scientific language as she is describing nature. I thought that this was very cool that Latin helped with the scientific language, and gave me a better understanding of the text, and her scientific point of view.
Grace Ritter
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