<p>Tyranna est. (But no grades…this course is credit/no-credit. )</p>
<p>If you give D an inch, she’ll take a mile. So confronted with having to memorize the endings for first conjugation verbs, I took what she presented as the standard mnemonic and set it to a rappish kind of beat and then choreographed arm & leg movements (think something out of “Fame”): " -o or -m! -s, -t! -mus, tis, -n-t!" I only did it in the supermarket parking lot, not the market aisles itself, you think she’d appreciate my restraint but noooooooooo!</p>
<p>In a subsequent lesson, she was going over first declension case endings: -a -ae -ae -am -A -a (sorry, can’t do the long A macron without digging into coding) and as she said it, she informed me this was a Latin orgasm. </p>
<p>Where she gets this predilection for high inside fastballs, I don’t know.</p>
<p>D <em>did</em> get the Latin Harry Potter when it first came out.</p>
<p>This is going more slowly than I would like, partly because of time–I’m juggling a fair amount–and partly because I’m just not as quick as I was 30 years ago.</p>
<p>“I only did it in the supermarket parking lot, not the market aisles itself, you think she’d appreciate my restraint but noooooooooo!”</p>
<p>What a hysterical mind picture you painted there, TheDad—Thanks!</p>
<p>Alas, you’ve come to join a club of ever increasing numbers, those of us who aren’t nearly as “quick” ( in any usage of the word) as we were 30 years ago. LOL!</p>
<p>All I can say is that sometimes the synapses synap faster than others. What’s really disconcerting is that I notice my memory is much better when I’m not tired. Or, to put it the other way around, I find that if I can’t remember something when I’m tired, I often remember it the following day when I’m rested. E.g., the name of a book, or who-was-that-20-years-ago-who-said, etc.</p>
<p>TheDad, pardon my blondness, but upon reading the title of your post, I excitedly clicked on thinking you were taking salsa or merangue lessons!</p>
Now that’s a thought. He might be more graceful than Al Gore doing the macarena. Instead, he is declaiming… what: rosa, rosa, rosam, or, like poor Winston Churchill, mensa, mensa, mensam. As Churchill wrote in his memoirs, has anybody ever invoked a table? O table, thou art wobbly!</p>
<p>Urrr…I’m afraid that I make Al Gore look graceful, despite a couple of years of ballet, some judo. I recall once slow dancing with a woman who said, “You’re very light on my feet.” Another time I declined an invitation to dance, saying that I was a little stiff from bowling. “I don’t care where you’re from, let’s dance.”</p>
<p>Marite, oddly enough, I’ve been known to invoke all sorts of inanimate objects. Must be the fantasy/dramatic aspect.</p>
<p>Only a few days of Latin and I appreciate some of Avram Davidson’s stories even more…some of the dialogue is essentially Latin-in-translation.</p>
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