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 ...

  People often ask, “Do you translate into English when you’re listening to or speaking another language?” The short answer is no. Maybe I did once—back when I was still learning to trust the foreign language to carry meaning on its own. But now? No. Not even subconsciously. I know this because interpretation—real-time, oral translation—is not my strength. My brain doesn’t want to rock between two languages. It wants to stay rooted in one. And when I’m in that language, I’m all in. A potent example: years ago, I traveled with a group of U.S. Senators’ wives to the Soviet Union, serving as their liaison to the USSR government—particularly to the republic peace committees and the national women’s committee. I also helped informally as an interpreter when needed, though interpretation was never my forte. During a tour of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the group stood before a monument to World War II. The guide explained the history of the Nazi blockade of the city. I turned to...