A Word From Tony Augarde

Persona non grata: The English and their love-hate relationship with Latin

The English have had a love-hate relationship with Latin, as Tony Augarde explains.

When I was a schoolboy, Latin was a normal part of the curriculum. Grammar schools still taught the subject, even though its value was often questioned. The real reason for teaching Latin was probably that you needed to know Latin to get into the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. But teachers tended to justify learning Latin because it would supposedly help us with our English if we knew the Latin origins of many words. They never explained why this was preferable to learning more about English itself.

These teachers seemed to overlook the fact that etymologies can sometimes mislead us about what words mean. For example, if we interpreted the word October from its etymology, we would think it was the eighth, not the tenth, month of the year - because it was named Octo- from its position in the Roman calendar (November, similarly, was the ninth month). We might assume that miniature means a painting made with red lead, because it derives from minium, the Latin word for red lead or vermilion. Red lead was used to make ink for decorating manuscripts with paintings which, because they were usually small, became confused with Latin words like minor meaning smaller - hence the miniature.

There are many other Latin words which lost their original meanings as they were assimilated into English. If you adopt a particular persona, you are employing a word which the Romans used for a mask worn by an actor. If you are recalcitrant, you may be kicking back at someone or something (ultimately from the Latin word for your heel, calx). When an ancient Roman was delirious, he was likening himself to a ploughman not keeping a straight furrow (lira, the ridge between furrows). Farrago uses another agricultural metaphor, as the original Latin word meant "mixed fodder for cattle".

Our enthusiasm for taking words and phrases from Latin has gone in waves. The Renaissance was a particularly fruitful time for borrowings from Latin. Sir Thomas Browne even anticipated my schoolteachers when he said that, "One must learn Latin to understand English." The English language was flooded with new words derived from Latin. Some 16th-century writers objected to these newcomers as "inkhorn terms". They disliked such Latinate words as celebrate, extol, and native, which nonetheless became firmly established in English. The 19th-century was another golden age for Latin borrowings. The Latin word for end, terminus, was taken to designate the station at the end of a railway line. The Latin for "I play" became the name for the game of Ludo. And punsters named a bicycle for two a tandem, from the Latin for "at last" or "at length".

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