Word: mensa
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Sixteen years ago a wealthy, eccentric English barrister name Roland Berrill organized Mensa, a club to be composed of men and women with an intelligence quotient higher than that of 99.9 per cent of the population. Berrill envisaged a round-table society (hence the same Mensa, Latin for table) of eggheads gathered together to exchange good talk and to serve as an advisory group in government policy-making...
...Mensa's membership grew slowly, for obvious reasons, and the Berrill recruits became increasingly lonely in their Olympian solitude, finally deciding to open the club to the rest of the top one per cent of the English people. Galled by this latitudinarian admissions policy, Berrill retired from the scene muttering about declining standards of excellence...
...measure than that Latin is a dead language and should therefore remain dead . . . The truth is that the study of Latin is a training for the muscles of the mind." But the Daily Mirror's Cassandra argued that Latin had muscle-bound his mind. He began by declining mensa (table), then wrote: "This nonsense I have been carrying around with me in the lumber room of my mind for 40 years. Like the geese of Strasbourg, I was force fed . . . and I still can't unlearn to talk to a table or a squad of tables, addressing them...
...grammar is defective, and it fails to accomplish its object, for like the paper mentioned it "does not argue, it states." Again, sententia, if the editors really insist on using a Latin word where an English one does better, is a word of the first deciension (sententia, ae, like mensa), and consequently it is not only hard on the President, but a violence to the English and Latin tongues when we read, "the small sententia of a Cambridge paper are superfluous. But the President is another matter...
...Mensa Academica at the University of Vienna will be opened...