We believe: English towns on wrong track to get rid of Latin phrases.
There are a couple of towns in England that are banning the use of Latin words and phrases in official documents. That’s simply “reductio ad absurdum” or, in official English documents, “leading back to the absurd.”
According to an Associated Press report, town councils in Bournemouth and Salisbury want to ban such words as “exit” and “alibi.” They want to substitute “genuine” for “bona fide” and improvised for “ad hoc.”
“To deny the hybrid nature of the English language is almost like an ethnic cleansing of English,” said Peter Jones, a retired professor of classics at the University of Newcastle in England.
Well, yes. Such a move by provincial English cities is not for the good (“pro bono”) mostly because whatever has been said in Latin seems deep (“quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur”). It is also ingrained in our language, and changes would be cumbersome.
Lawyers would have a particularly tough time. They would have to make a “request for the body” instead of “habeus corpus.” “Stare decisis,” concerning legal precedents, would be “to stand by decided things.”
England would have to rename its “Magna Carta” to “the Great Charter.”
How about university graduates? They would no longer be given a degree “magna cum laude” but “with great praise.”
A doctor could no longer write when “rigor mortis” sat in. It would be the “stiffness of death.”
Those English town councils could no longer have an “agenda,” just a list of things to be done. Comedians could never end their skits by saying “risum teneatis, amici?” (can you help laughing, friends?) Well, never mind, they never say that anyway.
The Marines would have to give up “semper fidelis,” and just say they are “always faithful.”
The Catholic Church gave up saying Mass in Latin a long time ago. Still, some churches still hold a Latin Mass weekly and priests, it is presumed, still study Latin, so they can bless their congregation with “Dominus vobiscum” (“the Lord be with you”).
We’d have to clean up our literature. When John Wilkes Booth yelled “Sic semper tyrannis!” after shooting President Lincoln, it would have to translate to “Thus always to tyrants!” It just doesn’t have the same gravity.
“Status quo” would become “the situation in which.”
Latin and Greek are the classical languages that form the root of many English words. English also borrowed heavily from the romance languages — French, Italian and Spanish, all of them descendants of Latin. So the English language, as expressive and majestic as it can be sometimes, is essentially a mutt.
It might be true that Latin is a dead language, but it is alive and well throughout the English and other European languages. To ban it would be to get rid of English’s heritage and add a burden of unnecessary words to our everyday talk.
We think people are savvy enough to know what certain Latin phrases mean. They are common parlance. Our cousins across the pond are on the wrong path if making documents easier to understand is the goal.
As an irony, Bournemouth would have to change the town motto from “pulchritudo et salubritas” to “beauty and health.” It would be a safe bet that the townspeople would balk at such a common motto.
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