Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

William Stott asks: Hey Gary! Bill Stott here, President of the Cornhusker Completionist Club. In the past, you talked about starting to study Latin when COVID hit. With it being a ‘dead language’, I have never heard it actually used conversationally that I know of, other than the many short phrases we commonly have incorporated into speech: “Carpe diem”, “veni, vidi, vici”, or the one you sometimes use on the show – “Mea culpa”. Could you please use it in a couple of sentences for us?

Latin is a dead language, but it is not an extinct language. There is a difference. No one speaks Latin as their native language, but there are still Latin speakers out there. You can find quite a few YouTube videos of people speaking Latin fluently, and there is a small group of Latin speakers out there.

Mea Culpa is just Latin for my fault. It has been used in many contexts throughout history. The term has remained in Latin and has been used in English as a phrase. It is also used in the Catholic Latin Mass.

In the city of Sienna in the 12th century, those guilty of murder, as part of their penance, had to throw themselves on the ground three times and say Mea culpa; peccavi; Domine miserere mei, which translates to “Through my fault. I have sinned. Lord, have mercy on me.”

The next time you bump into someone, instead of saying “my bad” just say “mea culpa.”

I won’t say that I’m great at Latin, but the act of learning it has taught me more about grammar, including English grammar, than I ever knew before.