Ad Astra per Latini

Francis Faraday
Professor of Brand Marketing and Merchandising in Linguistics
The Δίς Λεγόμενον Centre for Endeepened Ideation

Ab antique, if not ab initio, language looks to the—and its—past. Myths and legends of the fons et origo of language bedeck the arenas of the contemporary Mondial culturescape. Driven of course by the perennial question of the primum movens, language itself attests to its own historicity with the interweavings of ancient forms and formulae amidst its contemporary quotidianity.

Notable among the leaves of this linguistic tree is the language of Cicero, Pliny and Juvenal: Latin. Like the archetype of a punch-drunk boxer for whom the next fight is always the last, Latin is the sanctum sanctorum of the European tongues, which struts and frets still upon the banknotes, emblems, drapes, flags, seals, mottos and other paraphernalia of the populus mundi, centuries after its heyday.

Neither merely languishing nor lingering, Latin (fl. c. 450 CE) lives on.

Thus, while the quotidian must be granted its place, be it in the murkiness of the marketplace or amid the clatter of commerce, if one desires to see further than mere utility, one must ascend Mons Capitolinus and, gazing outwards across the Urbi et Mundi, not merely be inspired by, but in-spirari the glory, the majesty, the folly and the agony of the Caput Mundi, its legacy, its laws, its laity—and its language.

The Latinism lifts, levitates and enlightens.

And these are no mere archaicisms. What is an Austenian or Dickensian thee, thou and thine—or, worse, some coarse Prithee, gadzooks or verily from the pen of a Shakespeare, Milton or Donne, not yet half a millennium interred—to a ringing, vibrant, glorious Veni, vidi, vici or Senatus Populusque Romanus? Re the former, we might murmur a terse “sic transit gloria mundi”; to the latter, we utter as one “seculo seculorum”.

So, while Anglicisms anchor; Latinisms lucent; while Germanicisms ground; Classicisms crescent. Thus, with acta non verba as our verbum Dei, let your children, your children’s children and all generations thereafter be instructed in the liberal use of the legendary Latinism. Dulce periculum, is it not?

Ad Meliora!

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	SpecGram Vol CLXXXVII, No 1 Contents