- by Owen Morton
I think it's time - or, indeed, well overdue time - to consider my feelings on the subject of Medieval Latin. As the above title may suggest, said feelings are not particularly good. In fact, having now finished a Languages For All course in Medieval Latin, which I have been taking at the University of York (yes, I do actually do something other than mess with websites), I am inclined to think a) that I now know no more about the subject than I did when I started, some thirty two weeks ago, b) that I have wasted £35 in signing up for the course and c) that I have, since the course took place on Monday evenings at 6.15 until 8.15, squandered my chances of watching Enterprise, the new Star Trek series which airs on Sky at 8.00pm on Mondays.
On the other hand, of course, having seen the course right through to the end (unlike some skivers I could name, Steve), I am - assuming I passed the final exam - now entitled to own a little certificate, put it on my CV that I have done this course, and impress potential employers with the fact that I know a little Latin. Of course, I don't know much Latin at all. I can translate the phrase, "In Dei nomine," which means, "In God's name," and also various other random stuff. But what I know isn't going to be very useful in any situation. Not that Latin is generally useful anyway. But hey. It looks impressive.
The problem is that for every two-hour lesson I spent on the course, I was hating pretty much every minute of it. It wasn't particularly interesting, the teaching moved at too fast a pace (by the third week we had apparently covered everything you'd do in a Latin GCSE) and, moreover, I couldn't do it. There were twenty of these two-hour lessons, and I attended all but two of them. The first I missed was way back in November, when I felt really, really ill, and I suspect that there is a strange dearth of articles on this site for the week when I was ill, though I don't know. This was a perfectly legitimate excuse. The other lesson I missed was two weeks ago, when Nottingham Central Library decided I'd have to have an interview, even though I've been working there for two bloody years, and accordingly made me go back to Nottingham to do one. But we really don't want to get into that.
At first, there was some kind of reason for me taking this LFA course. I reasoned with myself that once it was done, I would be able to read medieval documents without having to bother getting them translated - which would be a great bonus to me, as my particular area of interest in history is the medieval period. Of course, it rapidly became obvious that the only reason I was taking the course was that at the end I'd get my nice little piece of paper which would make me look dead good. Various other people have suggested other reasons why I might be taking the course. Peter McDonald asked whether it was because I'd gone "strawberry-jam-mashing mad", as I recall, while Jonathan Barker sought to attribute an even more intelligent reason to it, wondering whether I was doing it to attract the ladies. I denied this rather vigorously, on the basis that a) it wasn't working, and b) why the hell should it be working?
Having now finished, I am inclined to feel that - even if I do get my certificate, which will probably count for, well, shit, in the wider world - I have wasted the £35 I paid to be on the course. And I don't think this article is particularly amusing, so let's finish it off in an interesting way.
They come in all shapes and sizes, squirrels do! They can be cuboids or spherical! And the amazing colours they come in, too! Red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue, to quote a well known rhyme!
Look, here's one:
I think the sceptical among my readership would submit that this isn't really a squirrel at all, just bits of one in a purple box with rather poorly drawn hands and feet. Well, they'd be right, to be perfectly honest.
Right. I think it's time to end this article before it descends into further levels of inanity.