Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

We should redirect all of the "radical linguistic prescriptivists" from English to Latin: it's already dead.

But once, it was alive.

One of my favorite stories from my high-school Latin (Yes, I am that old that my school had a Latin requirement, but not so old that I remember Latin as a living language) was when we were reading Caesar's Gallic Wars. Mr. Ligon was explaining to us the "Ablative of Military Accompaniment."

For those unfamiliar, Latin inflection allowed that prepositions sometimes be omitted. When a noun was in the ablative case, it could often function as a prepositional phrase sans preposition. And through the centuries, Latin scholars post hoc had come up with names and rules for all of these situations.

So we encountered the "Ablative of Miliary Accompaniment" while reading Caesar in Mr. Ligon's class. Having explained it, he then noted: "This is the only occurrance of the 'Ablative of Military Accompaniment' in all Latin texts known to us. In reality, it is just a fancy name for the night Caesar got drunk in his tent and forgot to write down the prepostion."

Suddenly, albeit briefly, Latin came alive. Thanks, Mr. Ligon.