Amo, Amas, Amat, Miss Alley's full of snot!
Bo, Bis, Bit, Miss Alley's full of ....!
Well, you get the point. That's the only Latin I remember from my high school Latin class. My teacher first year was Miss Catherine Alley, a spinster from Georgia, and Mr. Aubrey Eggers, an old bachelor from Glen Alpine, North Carolina, was my second year teacher.
The only reason I remember that little bit of Latin knowledge is the two little ditties I and my fellow students used to memorize the conjugation of these two verbs.
Unfortunately, that's the extent of my pre-college training in the classics. Caesar's "Gallic Wars" and Edith's Hamilton's book on Roman mythology.
The next time I attempted the classics was eight years later as a returning veteran at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
UNCA considered itself to be the liberal arts campus in the UNC system. Don't know about that then, but we did have a pretty extensive focus on the liberal arts. I remember that in order to get beyond the sophomore year one had to take a battery of tests to judge one's abilities in history, basic science, literature, art and music.
I don't know of many state-supported schools today that require the training in the disciplines one needs to write clearly, think inductively, and to express one's self fairly elegantly (present company excluded, please). That seems to be a creature of the past.
