Latin is not a magic bullet that will kill the demons destroying Christendom. But it is a fact that so long as the literate classes of Europe and North America were brought up learning Latin, writers knew how to write clearly and effectively, and even ordinary people who had studied 4 years of Latin were more open to logical argument, more interested in truth than educated people are today
Christie disgusting. With Trump’s support at 60% and most of the other 40% in the GOP thinking the legal cases against Trump are bogus, it’s ludicrous for Christie to base his whole campaign on validating the charges.
The big reason I welcome colder weather is that after the inescapable shorts and sleeveless shirts of Sicilian summer I can wear jackets and suits again. But not only because a jacket lends respectability – my vaguely professorial look has on occasion helped me get credit from merchants and of course I would never go see the bank manager dressed for a budget excursion – but also because a gentleman’s jacket is like a lady’s handbag. It safeguards the algorithms.
Then it should be obvious to all that clarity, one of the rhetoricians’ requirements for good prose, is particularly important in translations of Scriptures and liturgies. Another primary requirement, correctness, is related to clarity, because languages with prescriptive rules are less ambiguous than languages where “I say potayto, you say potahto,” and where a majority of speakers do not know the difference between relative clauses introduced by which and those introduced by that.
Dr. Fleming looks at a film adaptation of a novel that he has enjoyed and finds it wanting across the board.Homework for our next episode, 1993’s Tombstone.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with much help from pro-lifers. They expected him to appoint U.S. Supreme Court justices who would overturn the anti-constitutional Roe v. Wade decision, which had aborted all state laws, including those that had legalized abortion.
In this brief episode, Dr. Fleming explains a method he recently used to deliver some of the best turkey breast he’s ever had. He also holds forth on green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and pecan pie.
The gentle reader, I’m quite certain of it, is long grown tired of my adventures in the dentist’s chair. But the naked man – or the man with lice, in another version of the Russian proverb – keeps on about the bathhouse, as “thou talkest of what ails thee.” And so I square up for yet another round of self-indulgence and self-pity, an indifferent hand to begin with, but downright embarrassing when played once too often.
When the Novus Ordo was imposed by the Vatican hierarchy, the biggest losers were probably the English-speakers. As everyone knows, the official version of the NO Mass is in Latin, and the translation into English was not only poorly and ineffectively written but it was filled with errors, some of which, I suppose (to give the plotters the benefit of the doubt) was simply the result of their own poor English.
Latin has been the language of the Western Church for roughly 1500 years, but it has also been the language of western Christendom, by which I mean the Christian civilization that incorporated the best of the Greek and Latin pagan traditions, Christianized them, and created that great glory we call the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, but which we should call the Christian Age, the age of Dante and St. Thomas.
