Latin In Everyday Occurrences 

1. The Natatorium:

 During my last swim meet, as we approached the building in the car, I looked out the window and saw that scripted on the building was the word "natatorium." At first, I didn't know what this meant but then I remembered back to Latin and realized that this word came from the root "nare" or "to swim" in Latin.  This would later be translated into "natator" or "swimmer," hence the swimming pools the building was made for.

2.  The name "Endymion:"

 My cat is named Endymion, and I knew the myth behind his name before, but recently I was reading a book and his name popped up again but this time in a new myth. This myth was about Zeus and the goddess Selene. Apparently, Endymion was her lover and he was put into an eternal slumber by Zeus, and the reason why I'm writing about this in the first place is that in the story, there are a bunch of references to other gods and goddess I only knew about because of Latin class, so I didn't have to spend the extra thirty minutes looking up all the gods I potentially didn't know. You got to love Saturnalia and the god/goddess project of Latin two! 

3. Cleopatra: 

When we were researching for our project over Caeser, I stumbled upon an article all about Cleopatra and this article described her life with Caeser and especially her suicide. This spiked interest so I read more into it and I'm glad I did. A couple weeks later in another class, we randomly got on the topic of her and I was the only one who knew how she died in the whole class. Let's just say I got some extra brownie points with my History teacher because of Latin class.

4. "Ad Astra:"

A couple days ago, I was in chem and we were brainstorming different Latin sayings. One of them was "ad astra," and only the Latin students knew what it actually translated to. Everyone else knew it had something to do with the stars but they didn't know the origin or the literal translation for it. So I told them it means "to the stars...," and it was first written by Virgil who had said "sic itur ad astra," meaning, "thus one journies to the stars."

5.  "Abolir:"

I'm currently teaching myself french and as I was studying, tonight actually, I came upon a word I had never seen before but I  knew what it meant because of Latin. The French word "abolir" means "to abolish" in English, this is also "abolere" in Latin, and I once remember looking up this word in the Latin dictionaries one time for something. Since they look so similar, I put two and two together and got the translation right. I was so proud of myself!

Reflection:

Latin has not only helped me a lot but definitely with learning a romantic language. I can't even count the number of times I have known the definition of a word I had never seen because of Latin. This has helped me tremendously because I have the memory of a swallow, so it's hard for me sometimes when it comes to vocab, Latin has been that extra tool in my toolbox for new words and it makes me happy to know that it will be there for the rest of my life. I believe everyone should take Latin because of the amount of help it gives to someone when they are trying to become bilingual in a romantic language, plus Latin is just a fun class overall, so i just highly recommend the class to anyone (it's way better than Spanish).

By: Cat Grayson