Latin Lessons Can Be Fun
It's perhaps hard to believe, but Latin can be enjoyable. My old school, Blackpool Grammar, neve seemed to have a dedicated Latin teacher. We had a different teacher for Latin for every one of the five years we studied it. None of them seemed particularly competent at the subject, and all taught it as their second, or third, subject. It was not entirely surprising then that only two pupils out of a class of 33 managed to pass Latin at "O" level. One was a rather studious "swat" who intended to enter the sixth from classics department, and he only passed with a grade "C" or thereabouts. The second pupil to pass was... wait for it... me! To be quite honest, it was no less than I had expected, and I was surprised only by the fact that nobody else managed to pass.
Vincere & Ducere
Even the most staid of our Latin teachers seemed to enjoy the delights of conjugating verbs such as vinco and duco, to conquer and to lead. The third person plural is enough to evoke wide grins in most schoolboys, forming as they do, a taboo expression in English.
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Personal Memories of Fun in Latin
The following will probably not mean much to most people, but they were funny at the time, and I enjoy relating and sharing them.
Ambush or Bacon Tree
I can remember the teacher, "Billy" Beetham, a pleasant fellow, with a slightly absent minded air. One day I raised my hand and asked "Please sir, is "insidiae" a bacon tree". With a dead straight face Sir answered, "No, Chard, it's an ambush". I seem to recall this got a laugh from most of the class, fortunately it did not get me a detention, as "Sir" never appeared to notice the laugh, or to work out he had been suckered into a perfectly timed punchline.
Nauta Adiuvit Anus Per Via
By far the funniest incident in my entire school days was this one.
That year's Latin teacher, in the fifth form I think, was Ken Topping, who had bright orangey red hair, and a temper to match. He was not a teacher to meddle with, and needed to be treated with respect, rather like a firework.
One particular day he had picked one of the least academic boys in the class, one Barry Brown to translate a simple sentence from English to Latin. The sentence was "The sailor helped the old lady across the road." From memory this translates as "Nauta adiuvit anus per via", the word anus being pronounced with a short "a" sound as in apple rather than a long sound as in apricot.
After what seemed like half an hour K. T. had managed to squeeze most of the sentence from Brown, with assistance every painful step of the slow and laborious way, until Brown got to the "anus" part which he pronounced with a long "a". "No", roared Topping, "Anus!" (short vowel sound), "Anus" (long vowel sound is something completely different!" He never explained what the "something completely different" was, and the rest of our semi-dormant and docile class never let it trouble their minds to think what.
Perhaps I should pause here to explain that according to our Latin book, anus (short vowel) meant "old lady". I started to ponder, there was plenty of time as Brown was still only about half way through his torture. I suddenly realised that I had heard the word before, and had perhaps not realised until that point, that it was indeed a Latin, and not an English word. It is used as a medical term for the opening at the lower end of the gastro-intestinal tract, and for those more familiar with anglo-saxon than Latin it translates as arse-hole. At this point, I was the only one out of thirty three students who had realised this.
My keen sense of humour seized on several aspects of this. First the fact that the mildly taboo word itself had been used, second that a teacher had referred to it, thirdly that Brown had given the sentence an entirely different meaning. This was enough to start me smiling, and I looked around to see if anybody else had seen the light also. Alas, no, there were only glazed eyeballs with no light of realisation in them. My mind started to visualise the new sentence, and this increased the entertainment factor for me. I could not understand how the other 32 dull clods in my class could all fail to see the joke. This amused me even further.
By this time, a minute or so had elapsed since the revelation, and I found I was having to work hard to conceal my mirth. So long had passed, in fact, that I realised that Ken Topping could not be expected to know why I, alone out of all the class, was laughing so much that I could scarcely control myself. I was holding my sides, and biting my tongue in an effort not to laugh out loud. Ken Topping's fuse was so notoriously short that I would have been bawled out or flattened before I had any chance to explain. There would have been considerable injustice, I thought, in getting bollocked for being the only one bright enough to have seen the joke. It would not have been the first or the last time I was in trouble at school for thinking above the level of my peers. The humour intrinsic in this fact further propelled my overall level of helplessness, and my ribs began to ache with the effort to restrain myself. I can't be sure about the passage of time, but it now seemed ages from the start of the incident, and if I had now been spotted almost helpless with laughter, and burst out laughing out loud, it would have been incomprehensible to all 33 of the other occupants of that room. Eventually the bell rang, the lesson ended, Topping departed, and I managed to stand up, take a few deep breaths and regain my composure.
I cannot remember whether I tried to explain the humour of the situation to any of my fellow classmates, I suspect that the effort would have been wasted. Many jokes lose their humour when they need to be explained. Even if my classmates had been told the other meaning of anus, they could never have seen themselves or their glassy expressions, or realised that they were a large part of the humour in the situation.
On mature reflection, I suspect that Topping would have been delighted to learn that at least one of his pupils had bothered to exercise his brain sufficiently to see the humour created by a simple play on words, a double entendre. It is almost certainly too late now for him to ever share this small secret, this event took place over forty years ago. As you can guess from my account, it still lives vividly in my memory, and I enjoy sharing the story with others of like mind.
Over the past forty years, I have seen numerous funny incidents, many of them only small and fleeting, but nevertheless packed with latent humour, and I have been the only one to see the incident, or the humour contained within it. Most of these incidents are so transient that they would never withstand retelling or explanation. I can sit enjoying a coffee at a pavement cafe in a foreign country, and be endlessly amused by passers-by, traffic, birds, animals, anything. All it needs is the time to relax and observe. Some people seem incapable of doing either. Others possess in addition, the ability to extract and recall the essentials, perhaps refine them, and retell them, These include most of the great comedians, most of whom seldom tell jokes, but rather relate incidents and situations, and have the skill to re-enact them without losing the essence of the humour.
Humour
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