Latin for All Occasions: From Cocktail-Party Banter to Climbing the Corporate Ladder to Online Dating-- Everything You'll Ever Need to Say in Perfect Latin - Softcover

Beard, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1592400809 ISBN 13: 9781592400805

Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2004

Synopsis

With more than 200,000 copies in print, Latin for All Occasions and its follow-up, Latin for Even More Occasions, have helped scores of readers harness the language of Caesar and Cicero. Impress your boss with Occupational Latin (Lingua Latina Occupationi); sell your product with Sales Latin (Lingua Latina Mercatoria); flirt with your classics professor with Sensual Latin (Lingua Latina Libidinosa); look like the hipster you are with Pop-Cultural Latin (Lingua Latina Popularis); survive the holidays with Familial Latin (Lingua Latina Domestica) and Celebrational Latin (Lingua Latina Festiva). It's all here, whether you're a student of the language or just want to talk like one.

From cocktail-party banter to climbing the corporate ladder to online dating, Latin for All Occasions features dozens of handy sections, including Las Vegas Latin, Latin for Golfers, Latin for Breakups, Latin for the Politically Correct, and much, much more. In one easy-to-use volume, National Lampoon founder Henry Beard presents hundreds of listings rendered in grammatically accurate classical Latin, with a foolproof pronunciation guide.

Who says Latin is a dead language? From the comic genius who brought us X-Treme Latin comes Latin for All Occasions, guaranteed to help readers delight their friends, insult their enemies, and elevate the public discourse.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'Was I speaking Latin again?'
'Denuone Latine loquebar?'
'Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.'
'Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.'

Who says Latin is a dead language? Certainly not any former altar boys, public schoolboy, or any girl who ever dreamed of being Audrey Hepburn in 'A Nun's Story'. The Roman mass may be a thing of the past, but Latin's never been livelier – thanks to Henry Beard, former prisoner of the classics and best-selling author of 'Sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary' and 'Miss Piggy's Guide to Life'. He's come up with an essential tool to vindicate anyone who's ever winged it through mass or struggled with the ablative. Here, in one handy, easy-to-use volume are hundreds of everyday English expressions rendered into grammatically accurate, idiomatically correct classical Latin – with a complete, easy-to-use pronunciation guide. And all of these practical phrases are conventionally organized into familiar conversational categories, so that you can be confident that in any social situation some suitable Latin 'bona dicta' (bon mots) will be right at your fingertips.

'Latin for all Occasions' gives you the perfect phrase for every contemporary situation, from starting a relationship ('Frequentasne hunc locum?' 'Do you come here often?') to classic movie quotes ('Fac ut gaudeam!' 'Make my day!') through bumper stickers, personal ads, sports terms, answering machine messages, cocktail party chitchat, and much, much more.

The next time you feel like using the immortal language of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace to turn an ordinary remark into a timeless utterance, don't let 'feles, felis, feli, felem, fele' (the cat) get your tongue. Just pull out a copy of 'Latin for all Occasions'.

'Bona fortuna!' (Good luck!)

Henry Beard spent eight harrowing years studying Latin. After cofounding the English-language periodical 'National Lampoon' and writing a number of books in English, including 'Sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary' and 'Miss Piggy's Guide to Life', he is happy finally to have an opportunity to make some use of his knowledge of a language that really hasn't been all that helpful over the years, except for the time he suddenly realized that the thing he was about to order from the menu of a restaurant in Rome looked an awful lot like the Latin word for 'eel'. Mr. Beard resides in Novi Eboraci (New York).

About the Author:

Henry Beard founded the National Lampoon along with Doug Kenney and Rob Hoffmann. Prior to National Lampoon, Beard collaborated with Kenney at the Harvard Lampoon during the late 1960s, producing nationally distributed parodies of Life and Time magazines and a book-length parody of The Lord of the Rings called Bored of the Rings. Since leaving National Lampoon, Beard has authored and co-authored over 30 humor books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1592400809
• ISBN 13: 9781592400805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176