Amo...Amas...Amat...
There was something about Nancy Dostal that was far more than the facile attraction of student to teacher. She’d just marked her first quarter-century on our dear Earth and was in her first teaching assignment since completing college and then some. She would sit on the front of her desk, in a perfectly lady-like fashion with the 1965-appropriate hemline. Some times she would plant the balls of her hands on the edge of the desk next to her thighs and lean her semi-flawless torso forward toward her attentive students. There was nothing come-hither in her posture; with those legs there didn’t need to be.
Good ole Nancy Dostal. A product of Catholic schools, so no wonder she had a girlnextdoor angelic expression of innocence on her face. Could anyone that good-looking be that pure? Not if there’s a god; it wouldn’t be fair. Still, he could have a sense of humor, because here was this loveliness stirring the mighty unconscious of a classroom of ninth graders. Not only the boys, but also the girls, sitting there before the "competition", conscious or not of the titanic, oceanic primitivity washing back and froth.
Was she doing it deliberately? Was she even aware that she was getting those hors to mone? I don’t think so, at least not consciously. I do remember her as bright and friendly, and she seems to have done a very good job teaching Latin, since I frequently use what she taught and I built upon in my years of wordsmithery. Looking into the origin of words as I often do takes me back to what I learned from Miss Dostal. And the funny thing is that at the time, I scoffed at even the possibility that I — or anyone I knew — would ever have use for Latin.
I recall that television astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out that the origin of the word consideration, considerus, was the Latin meaning to be with the stars; as in, cosmically aligned, which is kinda neat. Another interesting "con" word is confidence, whose Latin root confidere means to trust one’s self. A third is conflict, from the Latin confligere, which means to strike together. My first image of "strike together" was two knights at Agincourt striking at each other with heavy swords, which certainly gives the word a negative connotation. An alternative perspective is that a swordsman would have a tough time training if he didn’t have someone to strike swords together with, if you get my drift. Or I can see two bearers hacking away with machetes trying to cut a path through the jungle. It depends on the context, of course, which is from the Latin meaning to weave together.
Much of our primary language — the roots of which are essentially European — is constructed from Latin, just as much of our scientific jargon is from Greek. Not a lot of young people today would opt for a year of Latin, even with great legs dangling from the desktop, but it certainly would make for a more educated, thoughtful, stimulated society fs more people understood the real meanings of just half the words that came out of their slack-jawed mouths.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.