According to a story, probably apocryphal, former US Vice President Dan Quayle once said, "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."
Latin is a dead language. No people speak it as their everyday language. The area south of the US is called Latin America because most of the people down there speak Spanish or Portuguese, both derived from Latin. Latin took its name from Latium, a region in ancient Italy. Various dialects of Latin eventually blossomed into the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, while Latin itself faded away. Fortunately, you don't have to travel to Latin America to use this week's terms from Latin. They have been borrowed into English and are now part of the language. de novo (day NO-vo) adverb Anew; from the beginning. [From Latin de novo (from new).] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=de+novo -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "Living things were not created de novo, but evolved." David P. Barash; Does God Have Back Problems Too?; Los Angeles Times; Jun 27, 2005. Sponsors' Messages: Subscribe to http://delanceyplace.com -- a carefully selected non-fiction book excerpt free to your email each day. It's the thinking person's daily quote. Get down to brass tacks, put in your two cents. Try Derivation, a fascinating game about word and phrase origins. A great gift! http://entspire.com ............................................................................ Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going. -Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957) Discuss this week's words on our bulletin board: http://wordsmith.org/board Remove, change address, gift subs: http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html Pronunciation: http://wordsmith.org/words/de_novo.wav http://wordsmith.org/words/de_novo.ram Permalink: http://wordsmith.org/words/de_novo.html This message was sent to "[email protected]".
