MSI Press Blog

Into Adult Years Latin did not end with high school. It simply changed shape and followed me into adulthood, showing up in places I never expected and proving itself useful in ways no guidance counselor could have predicted. During my international consulting years, I found myself needing French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian—even a bit of Moldovan. All those Romance languages, all those verb systems and noun patterns, were instantly familiar because Latin had already laid the tracks. Once you’ve internalized conjugation and declension, the rest of the Romance family feels like meeting cousins: different personalities, same bones. And it wasn’t just the Romance languages. When I later encountered German and Russian—languages that left many of my college classmates bewildered—their case systems made sense to me. Declension wasn’t foreign; it was simply another variation on a theme I had learned at nine. Latin had quietly prepared me for linguistic terrains far beyond its ...

  High School I did not see Latin again until I reached high school. Well, actually, that is not quite true I recognized the Latin influences on the French around me in the community. I recognized it again when in junior high I taught myself some Spanish in order to communicate better with a penpal in Mexico. My freshman year in high school, I tool Latin I. Most of the students in the class struggled with it, especially since the teacher was a grammarian and the course taught in the grammar-translation mode. But then, how does on teach Latin if not through the traditional approach of translation texts. After all, there is not a population  of Latin-speaking people today where students can be sent for immersion. Italy? Well, the language has evolved quite some distance from Latin though again one recognizes the Latin roots in the modern language. After Latin I, I took Latin II. The class was pretty small. Students were tired of the struggle, but a few of us did not find it a st...

  Latin, L2 Latin was perhaps my second language. Perhaps French was. It would be difficult to say since I grew up in a monolingual English household in a French-English bilingual community. French was “around” but had not arisen to a level of awareness by the time Latin came into my life—and stayed there for a lifetime.   Fourth Grade My father never completed high school. The oldest of six living children (a set of twins died right after birth), he had to drop out of school during the Great Depression and take a job to help support the family. He always wanted to finish, and he even signed up for a correspondence high school course. With eight children, however, he had his hands full feeding, clothing, and raising them. He was still working on that correspondence course when he died of a heart attack at the age of 58. Not having a formal education never held him back from intellectual activities. Neither did his daytime job as a shoe cutter nor his all-consuming wo...

  When my daughter told me her doctor was planning to do a hysterectomy , I was alarmed. She’s young. The idea of removing her uterus felt drastic and deeply concerning. But then the doctor clarified: he had said hysteroscopy , not hysterectomy. A big difference. That’s when my background kicked in. Because I knew: -ectomy means removal -scopy means to view or examine In other words, she wasn’t about to lose an organ—she was about to have it examined. This is why Greek and Latin still matter. Not just in dusty libraries, but in real, modern, high-stakes moments like these. ✨ Decoding Medical Mysteries Knowing classical languages is like having a decoder ring in your back pocket. Medical jargon that can sound intimidating suddenly becomes... understandable. Some examples: Gastrectomy – removal of the stomach ( gastro = stomach , ectomy = removal ) Gastroscopy – viewing the stomach Nephrology – study of the kidney ( nephros = kidney , logos = study ) Osteoporosis ...