My latin teacher: response to the editorial “Datum isn’t, data are”

As I read the editorial “Datum isn’t; data are,”¹ I thought about why I already knew this: 4 years of Latin in high school. Although Latin was considered more a logic subject like mathematics than a foreign language course, as a teenager I was fully in agreement with the popular adage:

Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.

I had a teacher, Ms. Caughey, who taught carpe diem and collige, virgo, rosa (gather, girl, the roses) with a little extra emotion and put it on an exam, as I thought she would. I got a good mark on that test. It was only in medical school that I began to appreciate the value of her teaching, as I struggled to learn medicine and memorize the overload of data in seemingly endless didactic lectures. The medical vocabulary based on Latin was the only easy thing. Albino (L. albus), supinate (L. supino), pronate (L. prono), ulcer (L. ulcus) were just common sense and did not require study.

I did not thank her personally, and she is one of many teachers I should have thanked. She was a classic subject for this quote of Henry Adams’:

A teacher affects eternity. He/she can never tell where his/her influence stops.