Brett Savage
The 5pm Quiz: Long Live Latin!
by Brett Savage - March 3, 2009 - 5:00 PM

Over the past few years, we’ve cranked out hundreds of quizzes. Chances are you haven’t aced them all just yet. We’ll be re-running a quiz from the archives each day at 5pm. Now we’ve even got a graphic.

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Latin is known as the “dead language” because not too many people who aren’t actively engaged in various religious ceremonies have a pressing reason to use it. Save, of course, a select few, including: lawyers, arborists/botanists and entomologists.

We’ve briefly resuscitated this root language in both a charitable effort to revive the moribund word and test your personal knowledge of the ancestral tongue that helped spawn the romance languages. The following are Latin phrases still very much alive and kicking in highly-specific niche fields of study. Can you tell whether the phrase is a legal term, plant/tree, insect or biblical quote?

Take the Quiz: Long Live Latin

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Comments (5)

  1. Latin is a deal language,
    It came from across the sea,
    First it killed the Romans,
    And now it’s killing me!!!

    posted by Samuel on 3-3-2009 at 5:55 pm

  2. I know “ars gratia artis” is “Art for art’s sake.” Could anyone provide me a Latin version of “Math for math’s sake?”

    posted by Bryan on 3-3-2009 at 7:14 pm

  3. Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA, will be phasing out Latin starting next year! Why? LOW ENROLLMENT. (Each class has consistently had 15 students for years.) BLASPHEMY!!

    posted by Sabrina on 3-3-2009 at 7:17 pm

  4. A lot of the Latin phrases I know came from Economics. “Ceterus paribus” and “caveat emptor” were among the favored phrases of Flunking Flanagan my Econ prof.

    posted by Jonny on 3-3-2009 at 10:15 pm

  5. 67% Not bad for a guy who’s never ever studied Latin. Just love language.

    posted by Johnny Cat on 3-3-2009 at 10:50 pm

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