I learned another new word…
I’ve learned three new words in the last 6 months reading this forum.
Yea, me!!
The meatballs are called kotlety. Were they breaded?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/post-next/interactive/2025#pati-jinich
“Jinich’s mission to highlight the ways migration has shaped and intertwined far-flung cultures — and to spark empathy from viewers — feels more urgent than ever, she says. “The immigrant story is everywhere. People have moved since the beginning of humanity, because of weather or danger or whatever,” she said. “Being an immigrant means that in some way, you’re always trying to find home. We all as humans are searching for that feeling of home, so we have that common ground.””
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I spent 20 years as a professor. You would not want to see the written assignments my students turned in.
I loved diagramming sentences. I don’t think they’ve taught that for a century, I swear.
Don’t get me started …
Please unlearn this one!
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All the language talk and @greygarious’s post on another thread reminded me of this excellent piece
Which according to my classical Latin prof was pronounced something like “Waynie, Weedie, Weekie”.
Funny the assumptions some people make, though. She did a show of hands “who’s a classical languages major?” and I was the only one out of 30 who was not. When she learned I was an engineering student, she grabbed me on the way out that first class and offered me extra help if I needed it.
I just smiled and said thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
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I didn’t find Latin all that difficult, but I bet engineering would have been tough for me 
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I’m reminded of George Carlin and Gallagher and their pieces on the English language. Memorable.
“Waynie, Weedie, Weekie”
Was your Latin prof German, by any chance? Some Germans (to the great amusement of native English speakers) confuse the “v” sound with “w.”
Correct!!! Gonna go dig out my HS copy of the Aeneid … actually, no I’m not. 
ETA - for proof that I studied Latin. Not for proof of the quote.
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That makes me well over 100 years old. 
But diagramming wasn’t a normal part of the curriculum in my day either. I was lucky to have a young teacher back in the 5th and 6th grade who insisted on teaching it.
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My partner has pointed out to me on numerous occasions that my particular verbal tic is “So here’s the thing…” before pushing up my glasses and “but ACKshully”-ing the conversation.
I’m working on it.
I know the bits are superficially similar, but it seems a little sacrilegious to bring up a sad hack like Gallagher in the same breath as a verbal jazz genius like Carlin.
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Me too, I guess. I was taught diagramming, I think it was in high school.
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The “v” pronounced as “wuh” is pretty standard for Latin in my neck of the woods (high school and college Latin in the New England area).
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Wow. I learned something today! Our Latin teachers had ongoing discussions about how the “c” was pronounced: hard like a ‘k’, or sharp like the ‘c’ in celebrate.
Not like you can ask a Roman from back in the day 
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My PIC uses “to be honest” a lot. I always want to say “as opposed to what?” since it implies he otherwise lies to everyone 
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It’s my understanding that ancient Latin had the ‘c’ pronounced as a ‘k’, hence the word “Caesar” having essentially the same pronunciation as “Kaiser”. As distinguished from ecclesiastical Latin which arose rather later, obv. Ancient pronunciation is a whole slippery kettle of fish. Lack of actual recordings don’t help, but inferences can be made by noting how vowels tend to shift over the time we HAVE been paying attention, and sort of ‘working backwards’ in that way. There’s also poetry and other verse which is meant to rhyme, and thus gives clues about how clusters of words that might be disparate today might be more connected in the past.
There’s whole video series of linguists going into truly nerdy detail about English etymology, pronunciation, and how they trace words to a theorized “Proto-Indo-European” language that is thought to be the root of most of the ‘western’ and south Asian languages, including all the Romance languages, Germanic, Cyrillic, Norse, Gaelic, Hindi and the several dozen other languages on the subcontinent, and, I think, all of the middle eastern languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
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