I'm not really sure what to write for this blog post. No offense intended whatsoever, but the forum was basically an ad for "STUDYING ABROAD"!!! Dr. Z (as Dr. Brewton appeared to be calling him) spoke for about ten minutes before running out ("Time is Galleons, little brother." Bonus points to whoever can instantly tell me who said that.), but he did stress to us the importance of studying abroad and learning multiple languages, including a sort-of joke that goes like this:
"What do you call a person who speaks three or more languages?" "Multilingual." "What do you call a person who speaks two languages?" "Bilingual." "What do you call a person who only speaks one language?" "American."
Which makes me feel very warm and fuzzy inside that I am taking German. I would also be taking LATIN, if this university would actually GET WITH THE PROGRAM and OFFER IT.
Yes, I know. I am very annoyed at the lack of Latin at UNA. Or Greek, for that matter. Greek sounds like a fascinating language to learn. Or Old English! I would love to learn Old English! Distant runners up would have to be Italian (finally I would know what are all the terms in my piano books... actually, I can guess half of them due to three years of Latin) or Old Norse... yeah, I'm weird. I read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun. I love looking up the meaning of names and random words. Yesterday in my piano lesson I translated 'morendo' as 'dying away' even before my teacher pulled out her dictionary of musical terms. This somehow sparked a small discussion, which ended with me saying how I love etymology (kudos to Dr. Christy for throwing it in our German lessons) and her naming three relatives, each of whose names I knew the meaning of instantly.
(They were, by the way, Dante, Dominic, and Vincent. Good, old-fashioned, strong-sounding names. I love old names! Or, at least, names that MEAN something, instead of this let's-smash-two-names-together-and-name-our-poor-child-this sort of thing you see so often know. Anyway, Dante comes from 'durante' which is the Italian derivative of the Latin participle 'durans' which means 'enduring'. Dominic means 'of the Lord', which should make sense as 'Dominus' is 'Lord' and 'Dominicus' means 'of the Lord'. The days of the week in Spanish, anyway? I think Sunday is called 'Domingo' at anyway... And Vincent means 'victorious', from the Latin verb 'vinco', which means 'to conquer'.)
I am such a nerd. I am the queen of all nerds. All hail me, supreme ruler of dictionary-readers.
Aaaaaaaanyway, back to the discussion that should be at hand. The students who spoke to us about their own trips abroad had awesome Powerpoint presentations and notes and that sort of thing... which makes me feel very small as I had to give an oral presentation in English this morning about my research paper and I was pretty much the epitome of awkwardness up there in front of the whole class. The fact that I knew ahead of time I would only receive blank looks as I trotted out the myogenic theory of heart disease did not help. But the Honors students who spoke to us tonight had a much better fate. They even got us to laugh. I think it is a measure of your success if you can get your audience to laugh. An audience that is entertained is an audience that is relaxed and willing to be persuaded.
And I haven't even taken Speech! And I doubt Rhetoric in high school helped much... I basically read Aristotle's book and answered questions....
They really push this traveling/studying abroad thing. I accept the fact that it's a good thing, but I don't want to go anywhere right now. Let the people who have such things as social lives go first. I'd like to get used to college life before I do anything of that scale. As Dr. Brewton said, going after junior year is probably a much better idea. Ask me then and see what I'll say.
In Pace Christi,
Elyse
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