Latin (拉丁, ラテン, 라틴어)

The word Latin itself comes from the region of Latium, somewhere in Italy near Rome. The language of Latin is one that gives me fits on Jeopardy clues, especially when they come up in a whole categories of clues (that's 5 clues in language that I don't know how to speak!) and the double-whammy, in a category that I'm supposed to know a thing or two about, "Legal lingo in Latin." I was able to nail down "ipso facto" from tort class, and "pro bono" (volunteer work for lawyers that I don't do nearly enough of), but just couldn't pull the easiest clue on the board, defendants who were tried although not physically present, as "in absentia." And then the scary $2000 clue was actually pretty scary, a vague clue about legal opinions given "by the court" that doesn't show who dissented from the majority opinion, "per curiam." Latin was generally derided in high school as a "dead language," but somehow to get better at the SAT (of course my parents made me go to summer school to get better at the SAT!) I enrolled in a summer school Latin class all about learning the Latin roots and what they stand for. I remember I really liked the class! I memorized all of the roots that we were assigned to that week of Latin class! But then after taking the test and getting through summer school, just never thought about Latin ever again. Ironically, that Latin teacher was also the guy who ran the Scholastic Bowl (a high school version of trivia league) which I would have really enjoyed in high school, but I just never got into it, choosing to spend my time with Chess and Orchestra, one of the crossroads of my life that could have led my life in a direction. Little did I know how big a role Latin would play a role in later life, and really in everyone's lives: Latin is just everywhere in the English language. As I write this, the root "scrib" means to write, and scrib comes up in "scripture," "scribe" for someone who writes, and "script" for a movie script. I think about when we were prompted to select a foreign language to take in high school, it was generally French or Spanish, and then a few brave souls took German or something else (no Asian languages were offered back then, which is good because at least I took French and learned a thing or two about Romance languages), Latin had the best advertising because all it would have to do to persuade kids to learn would be show how many words have Latin roots in any sentence. Especially science (medicine, body parts) or law (legal terms love old dead Latin words), two of the "model careers" people would have loved getting into back then. And maybe adults did advocate for studying Latin in this way, I just ignored it. I'm paying attention now; plenty of Jeopardy champions have had great success with a Latin background, notably Amy Schneider. Clues this year that are purely Latin: "in vino veritas," the word in Latin for "a bad condition" is malady, pomegranate is "an apple with many seeds" in Latin, "succulent" is Latin for Juice, in media res means starting a story from the beginning. Alas, there is no going back to high school and learning Latin (iacta alea est, the die is already cast). But there's still time to learn some of it now!