It's Not Dead, It's Just A Zombie by Emily

It's Not Dead, It's Just A Zombie by Emily - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

One day in my sophomore English class, we were taking a test over some book or another we were reading at that time. I steadied my pencil, and I began. The comprehension questions were fairly straightforward, but then I saw a word that I had never seen before. The word was 'perambulate,' and for a moment, I panicked. I'm mostly decent when it comes to vocabulary, and I was desperately searching for context clues to help me decode this mystery.

But then I looked at the word closer. Perambulate. Per. Ambulate. It clicked (claruit).

When I was a freshman, I enrolled in Latin. I'm not quite sure why I decided on that for my language, but I think it had something to do with the fact that it was different, and I was quite the hipster in my younger years. And in Latin, our magistra, or teacher, taught us that in Latin, there are certain Latin words that align with the English language. These are called derivatives, and in that English classroom, on that test, I recognized that 'per' is the Latin word for 'through,' and 'ambulare' is Latin for 'to walk.' Context clues helped after I had dissected the word, and I got that question right.

That little anecdote was the first (primus) in many instances where Latin has entirely transformed my education. Participles. Gerundives. Infinitives. In nearly every class, there has been some tie-in to the wonderful world of the Classics, and the entirety of my heart is in love with that world. Oh, but it isn't just grammar. I have learned so much about our modern political system through the ancient republics and empires and democracies, and where I usually struggle in science, I have learned to look (spectare) at certain words that can be traced or, as with our classification system for animals, are directly from Latin.

In history, I have received (recipivi) synthesis points on essays through my knowledge of the classical world. In vocal music, it has been far easier pronouncing certain foreign languages, and in those foreign language classes, I have been able to progress easier thanks to the fact that I know that 'finire,' the fourth conjugation verb for 'to finish' means exactly the same as 'finir,' the French '-ir' verb that means the same.

This year, I am in my fourth year of Latin, an Advanced Placement class. The other five people studying with me are like my family. We have studied this beautiful, relevant language together for what will be four years in May. We have played Ludi- sports- together at the Oklahoma Junior Classical League convention, we have dined together on Saturnalia- the Roman holiday that inspired many Christmas traditions practiced today-, and we have, most importantly, revived from the dead a millenia old language that is in danger of falling away into oblivion.

So I guess you could say we're pretty cool. In a nerdy kind of way. Our language is pretty much a zombie, so that counts for something, right?

And, as Julius Caesar once said in his Commentarii De Bello Gallico, "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres."