Lest We Forget: "Italia Est Paeninsula."

My lingering embrace in the arms of a dead language.

[Who knew there was a Wikipedia edition in LATIN? Not I! (The letter “V” — as in “Vicipædia“ — is of course pronounced in Latin like our letter “W.”) You can view the page here for yourself, if you’re so inclined.]

Somewhere around here is an aged, yellowing piece of paper printed in gold and blue ink (as well as black). It’s an honorary certificate; you can see that much from just a brief glance in its direction. But if your glance lingers a few seconds longer, you may wonder just what the heck this “honor” even represents: although the words are formed of recognizable letters in the Roman alphabet, it’s not printed in English, or Dutch, or German, or Italian or Greek. But one thing will be plain: the name of the honoree, who was, well… me. The certificate attested to my place almost 60 years ago as a big fish in a vanishingly small pond: the people who took courses in the Latin language, and excelled in them.

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Now, I hadn’t wanted to take Latin; pretty much nobody wanted to take Latin, and I actively resisted the prospect. Come oooooonnnn! All the other guys are taking Spanish or French!: like that, in a petulant whiny eighth-grader’s voice. And it wasn’t like Mom and Dad “forced” me to take it, either; I don’t think either of them had ever taken a course in Latin or in Spanish or French, for that matter — it wasn’t a topic they’d have held firm opinions about.

No, the driving force — okay, all right: the impetus — for my choosing Latin was the voice of a teacher at the public high school I’d be attending starting in September of 1965. Nicholas (“Nick”) Lombardi, his name was, and he sat across a table from my parents and me in the cafeteria on “schedule your classes” day that summer. Advising us. Cajoling us. Pleading with us.

I don’t remember the exact words he used then but I think I can approximate them, because I still remember the sound of his voice, some of his favorite phrases and verbal tics, the vague and almost threatening bluster behind his firmly held opinions:

Good heavens! he might’ve exclaimed, waving a photocopy of my school records. Look at these standardized test scores! For heaven’s sake, you don’t send a child with scores like these to French or — sputtering, practically inarticulate — Spanish classes! John MUST take LATIN!

Well, what did any of us know, anyhow? Sullen, horribly embarrassed — What if one of the guys overheard that outburst?!? — I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

So: Latin it was.

I took Latin for three years in high school (not enough students took it to justify a class in Latin IV). Mr. Lombardi was, of course, the Latin teacher — he also taught an English-composition course for seniors called “Theme Writing,” so I ended up in that class, too.

This was the mid-1960s, and even in small suburban working-class towns it was hard for kids in high school to respond to earnest adult authority with anything other than laughter or resentment. Mr. Lombardi attracted both responses in about equal measure. He took everything so damned seriously, y’know? If he laughed, it had a sort of bitter My life’s work: up in flames! edge to it, as a student mangled a pronunciation or fell, flailing, into a mistranslation. He wielded the disgusted phrase “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” almost like a punctuation mark…

And as he stalked back and forth across the front of the room, spittle flecking the desks in the front row, he’d occasionally adopt a pose which dramatized the high intellectual emotion of the moment. So-and-so HURLED the javelin! he’d say, his left hand pointing up and out at the horizon, cocking his right arm back and suddenly whipping it forward…

My most anarchistic classmates could barely restrain their laughter sometimes.

But although I too had to laugh sometimes — never in class, though — I held a peculiarly awkward position: Mr. Lombardi just thought I was the cat’s pajamas. He might sneer at someone else’s answer; he might scoff as he listened to a lame excuse for a missed assignment. But he never had such reactions to anything I did, and in fact he actually leaned on me as a sort of teacher’s aide. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” he’d explode at the latest misstep from a quavering classmate, and then add, “TAKE it, John!”

Mr. Lombardi’s could get really, no, really embarrassing… Once, a few months after I’d stopped using cursive handwriting and switched to block printing, I remember him waving one of my papers over the heads of the other students — demanding to know why none of the rest of them could “write” so legibly. This was especially embarrassing because I’d picked up the habit of printing after admiring how neat it looked on a paper the guy next to me had turned in.

If this had been a jazz combo instead of a classroom of my peers, I’d have “taken it” with gusto. But as it was, I’d just sort of shrink further into my collared shirt and mutter a response. (My public-speaking skills always lagged behind my handwriting ones.)

So anyhow, that piece of paper:

Everyone taking Latin under Mr. Lombardi had to take an annual standardized test, the APSL exam. (APSL: the Association for the Promotion of the Study of Latin. On the certificate, the organization’s name was spelled out in full, in Latin — a detail maybe meant to cement in one’s head the intimacy between the dead language and the living.) APSL offered four levels of the exam, corresponding to the four grades of high school, so all Latin students in that grade, nationwide, took the same test.

I don’t remember the details of the test. All I remember is my final score (which is recorded on the certificate): of 120 possible points, I scored…

…120.

Mr. Lombardi’s head practically exploded. He claimed — openly in class, of course, as I shrank down to the size of a pinky fingernail — that I was the only freshman in the state of New Jersey who’d ever aced the test. (I’ve always doubted this claim.) After I repeated the stunt in sophomore year, well, from then on I never really had reason to try very hard for Mr. Lombardi. When I took Latin III and scored something like 118 out of 120, I don’t think he even noticed.

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I wrote a posthumous apology to Mr. Lombardi a few years ago, here. He was a genuinely good (albeit, yes, mildly eccentric) man, with a strong sense of right and wrong — he was a ferocious opponent of the US’s adventure in Vietnam, for instance: a pretty controversial stance for a public high-school teacher in the mid-’6os. True, he regularly embarrassed the bejeezus out of me. And yeah, privately and with friends I actually mocked him for it. I can sorta-kinda excuse my behavior (I was young, naive, blah-blah-blah).

But I do wish I’d appreciated him — and Latin — when it really would have meant something.¹

1. Just looking back over this extended brooding, I keep hitting word choices that drive home the lingering if unrecognized thread between then and now: impetus, of course, but also approximate, inarticulate, composition, translate, javelin (yes, all right, nitpickers: iavelin), certificate, examination, posthumous... even bejeezus, now that I think about it.