"...irrelevant-seeming knowledge, when properly acquired, is not merely a discipline that can be adapted and applied; it is likely to be exactly what is needed in circumstances that nobody foresaw… the ‘irrelevant’ studies of Greek, Latin and ancient history enabled a tiny number of British graduates to govern an empire that stretched around the world…"

Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling In A World Besieged, Roger Scruton.

"For an Italian of the fifteenth century, since practically everything worth reading, if not in his own language, was in Greek or Latin, these languages were the indispensable keys to culture. But since that time great literatures have grown up in various modern languages, and the development of civilisation has been so rapid that knowledge of antiquity has been much less useful than knowledge of modern nations and their comparatively recent histories."

‘Useless’ Knowledge, Bertrand Russell.

There is occasional big, mouthy talk about the degradation of our language as regards print and common usage. By the degradation of our language as regards print and common usage, I do not mean forming the request “One copy of The Daily Mail, please,” as I stand against both satire and sarcasm as being impolite. Rather it is the standards of written and spoken English that are said to have fallen. It is true that grown men bemoan this very same, laying blame quite variously upon television, text-messaging and colloquialism and so forth. I will not pretend to know much of either abbreviated mobular phone speak or the more lateral slang substitutions, as I use both only on advisement. However, it is the proposed solution that interests me most, that is the mandatory re-introduction of Latin into the curriculum. For it is over this dead language especially that a certain sort of educational battle is fought. This conflict sees, on a former hand, the need for education to service the knowledge we have, that it will hasten the arrival of such knowledge as we may yet acquire, while, on a latter hand, there is the importance of making a syllabus that is relevant and interesting to those who may suffer through it.

When I went to, what was then, a Roman Catholic school, Latin was no longer on offer. It was supposed that, if we understood the mass, we may not take it seriously. And if, as myriad educators are at pains to state, it would improve our conversing in English, the Christian Brothers had even greater reason to fear. However, had they considered the matter, they may have found that the language of the pagans turned papists could just as well grant a greater comprehension of our own tongue, that is Norn Irish. While Mr. Warner’s question of whether the Romans settled in Ireland continues to rage (slowly like a battered wife, not uncontrollable like Mail reader… once again, I stand opposed to satire and sarcasm), it is clear that their language reached the heart of ours by one artery or another. I will not pass off what follows as new philological research, that I would leave to the researchers in the philology departments, had they not all been closed as mere irrelevancies. Think of it, rather, as a runaway train of thought, the fires of which only ‘useless’ information could stoke and which only relevance could derail.

At this lapsed Roman Catholic school, it would not have been unusual for a teacher, a language teacher especially, to have called me an eejit (italics mine) for running with exactly the same sort of thought mentioned above. Yet, it requires no language teacher, but a brisk flip through a one-way Latin dictionary, for even the simplest eejit to realise that the origin of that word must lie in egeo (italics mine), that is the verb to want or to be in need. The eejit (in our approximation of the past that was me) is lacking in awareness or intellect; it is therefore something for which they have a want. It is understandable, then, from where we derive the phrase ‘to have a wee want,’ such as our grandparents would have employed to describe someone that we would, more sympathetically, term mentally interesting.

The deployment of such benign epithet was, of course, the teacher’s attempt to subdue my wayward thinking patterns into something that they themselves could shape. In Nirish parlance, such a manoeuvre would be an attempt to sleg (italics mine) or an example of a slegging (italics kindly on loan from… no, of course, the italics are mine). Conventional wisdom would trace the word’s etymology back through the standardised to slag (italics mine) of mainstream English. Slag is, most famously, the wasteful impurities that are removed during the process of smelting; therefore, to sleg could be considered a process of removing dross (eejits) from more ‘pure’ ‘metals’ (reasonable people). It is by no means certifiable to imagine that this labourious industrial procedure gave us the word that we use to mean ostracise or ‘to separate from the flock,’ certainly no more than it is to imagine it deriving from the word segrego (italics mine) meaning ‘to separate from the flock.’ An equally viable alternative is that we took the word from segmentum (italics mine), which translates as the verb to cut off or down or to shred, the crux of the slegging ritual that ends in the slegee being separated from the flock. It is possible that the phrase ‘Aahh, cut down’ has a similar story behind it, but such would not be as compelling as the tale of the Tara king who would literally ‘cut down’ grunts and underlings with his words, which is how the term is usually explained to children.

As a sensitive child, I would find that, after what are only innocuous attacks, I felt scundered (italics mine), which is a form of embarrassment or shame. The underlying feeling is recognition that one has brought this shame upon one’s self by acting or speaking foolishly. In other words, to scunder or scurror (italics mine) one’s self is to play the buffoon. The buffoon was a large, two-stringed Roman harp, not dissimilar to the Egyptian bint, the correct playing of which required the musician to bend so far over the instrument that they invariably fell. Such would naturally cause great embarrassment for the player’s pater- and materfamilias (italics mine) and, thus, to play the buffoon is to bring shame upon yourself and your parents. The meaning to assume the role of a Roman musical instrument is now obsolete.

Of course, I was only a bairn (italics mine) at the time and, as such, a burden to the teacher whose only duty was to knowledge itself. Baiulo (italics mine) is the Latin to carry a burden and understandably lends us a term for that weight which drags a pregnant lady’s stomach down. However, once born, a baby becomes a burden to all society, until it becomes self-dependent, and, thus, the word bairn is stretched further into meaning any unpleasant, wailing infant or reasonably young person. The bairn will inevitably be slegged, that is, as above, separated from the flock, most likely by being sent out of the room, as I frequently was. Into the pishing (italics mine) rain. The pishing rain was, of course, only truly habitable by a piscis (italics mine) or fish. Although, in all likelihood, the word comes from the French piscine (italics mine), as a swimming pool is, perhaps, the most accurate description of the weather that General Lauzun could make when writing home during the War of the Three Kings.

I cannot vouch that the above is true (italics mine). For that, a greater grounding in the patois of the Principate would be required (and, as Mr. Izzard observed, we don’t even know what accent they spoke with!). Were Latin to be taught in schools to children who, as back then, didn’t much care to learn it, I don’t imagine that the standards of speaking and writing would improve. Not because I think the decline irrevocable, but because children and adults will always speak and write as befits the situation. However, I can imagine that, were all arteries of living language taught in equal measure, the standards of communication would increase. Latin, if it is to be found in the pre- and suffixes of English, is there through force and learning. It is understood only because it is used. And the same applies to slang and text-speak. La Dulce Vita (Italian mine) awaits, surely, when the high and low cultures of eternity and immediacy swim around each other as in a Mr. Koons’ sculpture (metallic swine), a vita where one understands the origin of the word telephone, for example, as well as the garbled and truncated text-messages that arrive on it.