I good friend of mine forwarded this to me from today’s Times. Of course, berating a drunkard in perfect Latin is always advisable, except when the inebriating wine has been an Opimian, or the hungover man is too crapulentus, or intoxicated, which gave the English word ‘crapulous’. Incidentally, books are inebriating, too, and one comment about Richard de Bury (1287-1345), the author of the Philobiblon which inspired the name of this blog, says that his love of books borders on the obsessive. Let us, patres conscripti, drink to Latin and serve Latin to the bibber and the sponge, which each come from the Latin bibere (to drink) and spongia (self-explanatory). I could have said tippler, but then we would have crossed the limes into Scandinavian etymo-territory.
On a more serious note, it looks like interest in Latin is still quite widespread, and it is hoped that Professor Eleanor Dickey’s book Learning Latin the English Way, due next week, will add fuel to the study of Latin in the UK. If 1800 year-old conversational textbooks won’t keep Latin on the British agenda, nothing will.
biblonia 
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