Word: latinizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This week's cover story on the new Panama Canal agreement engaged TIME Correspondents Jerry Hannifin and Bernard Diederich in the past as well as the present. Diederich, our Mexico City bureau chief since 1969 and the winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Latin American reporting, has been following the canal situation for seven years. Yet as he reported this week, his reflections went back 35 years to the time when, as a boy in a U.S. Merchant Marine T-2 tanker, he first traveled the waterway. The canal, he notes, was then bustling with wartime traffic...
...There was all the excitement of a library reading room at high noon: teen-agers hunched in corners, muttering over dog-eared textbooks or stacks of index cards. The prevailing sense of humor was as old as the Roman hills: bantering buttons with such slogans as DA MI OSCULUM LATINE LOQUOR (Kiss me, I speak Latin) and ATLAS IS TOO STONED TO CARE...
...membership of the National Junior Classical League at Florida State University in Tallahassee last week, the Latin fest was like nectar to the gods. Classical scholars all, they had assembled from as far away as Alaska and Hawaii to compete in the Olympic Games of Latin Students, the 24th national J.C.L. competition. An elite group, 95% college bound, the delegates were variously attracted by sheer love of the classics, as well as affection for historic trivia and the fascination of what is difficult. Says Mike LaComb, 19, a St. Lawrence University freshman: "There's a thrill to the exacting...
...onstage over the lingua mater. "What case is required for the object of vescorl" shot out Questioner James Minter, 25, a candidate at Columbia University for a Ph.D. in classics. Flashing lights signaled the correct answer: "The ablative." Sample sticklers: "What Italian myth figure changed into a woodpecker?" "What Latin emperor was transformed, in a satire, into a pumpkin?" Answers: Picus and Claudius...
Despite the conventioneers' exuberance, Latin is still languishing in American high schools. The number of students taking it dropped precipitously from 626,199 in 1965 to 184,445 in 1974, and courses were deleted as being too dry and dusty. But the appeal of the arcanum shows signs of reviving Latin, along with the current educational drift back to basics. New courses in mythology and literature in translation have attracted students too. One innovative, popular program-used in ghetto schools to reinforce basic English grammar-even teaches conversational Latin by audiovisual methods. Besides, says Minter, "the classics still have...