latin

Do you know who 'twas that first knew our Lord had caused Himself to be born? 'Twas the cock; he saw the star, and so he said__ll the beasts could talk Latin in those days; he cried: 'Christus natus est!' " He crowed these words so like a cock that Kristin fell to laughing heartily. And it did her good to laugh, for all the strange things Brother Edvin had just been saying had laid a burden of awe on her heart.The monk laughed himself: "Ay, and when the ox heard that, he began to low: 'Ubi, ubi, ubi.' "But the goat bleated, and said: 'Betlem, Betlem, Betlem.' "And the sheep so longed to see Our Lady and her Son that she baa-ed out at once: 'Eamus, eamus!' "And the new-born calf that lay in the straw, raised itself and stood upon its feet. 'Volo, volo, volo!' it said.

Facilis descensus Averno:Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;Sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,Hoc opus, hic labor est.(The gates of Hell are open night and day;Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:But to return, and view the cheerful skies,In this task and mighty labor lies.)

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Mens videt astra.(The soul sees the stars.)

Per aspera ad astra, Papa,' I whispered. Through hardship to the stars.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation__he tools of the poet.

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.

Not Even The Greatest Sculptor Can Mold A Masterpiece Out Of Shit!

If there's a password needed at the gates of heaven, only Latin will unlock it, he thinks.

A Memory Is Better Than A Phony!

That was a good mark in Latin, and I am pleased with your steady improvement in it.

Ira furor brevis est: animum rege: qui nisi paret imperat.(Anger is a brief madness: govern your mind [temper], for unless it obeys it commands.)

I think we can all agree that the official language of the United States should be Latin.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus.

(on the word "fuck")'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.'She told me to got fuck myself.

He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.