Learning the vocabulary all throughout Latin is definitely beginning to pay off in my writing classes. In my expository writing class last week, we did a fun diction exercise to help us improve our writing. Basically, we read simple and well-known phrases that were written using $10 words (for lack of better words). One of the phrases was the following: Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity. Well, since we learned "pulcher" means "beautiful" a few chapters a go, I managed to be the only person in a 3000-level class of 14 to dumb down the phrase to: Beauty is only skin deep.

And that, my friends, is reason number 1,562,031 why Latin is great.

Olivia H.