LATIN IN 100 PHRASES: What the Words You Already Use Actually Mean, and Where They Really Came From: 32

LATIN IN 100 PHRASES What the Words You Already Use Actually Mean, and Where They Really Came From You already speak more Latin than you think - and some of what you've been told about it is simply wrong. >Then there's the gladiator line everyone knows: "those about to die salute you." It was spoken exactly once, by condemned prisoners at a single staged naval battle under Claudius - never as a routine arena greeting. No other source, ever, records it again. This book walks through one hundred phrases - from Horace and Virgil to Descartes and a nineteenth-century pope - and traces each one back to what actually happened, not what everyone assumes. You'll find phrases whose classical pedigree is rock-solid (Catullus's genuinely devastating "odi et amo," Cato's real and much longer refrain about Carthage), phrases whose ancient meaning has been quietly reversed by history ("vox populi, vox Dei" was first written down as a warning against trusting the crowd, not an endorsement of it), and words hiding in your own daily speech that are secretly still Latin grammar you never noticed - "agenda" and "data" are both technically plurals. You'll also meet "placebo," which began in a biblical psalm, then became a term for hired mourners singing insincere grief for pay, centuries before any doctor ever used it - one of the most satisfying word histories in this entire book. >A companion to this author's other volumes on Roman law, the twelve Caesars, the Roman army, and the fall of Rome - same rigor, same method, applied to the words that outlived the empire itself. >Cornelis van Houte