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    Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life
    Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life
    Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life
    Audiobook5 hours

    Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life

    Written by Harry Mount

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this lighthearted guided tour of Latin, journalist and former Latin tutor Harry Mount breathes life back into the greatest language of all, drawing on everything from a Monty Python grammar lesson to Angelina Jolie's tattoos. Filled with fascinating tidbits and humorous asides, Carpe Diem will delight the word lovers who made Eats, Shoots and Leaves such a monster hit.

    Whether we're aware of it or not, Latin is all around us. Consider the sayings in everyday use: alter ego, ad nauseam, caveat emptor, modus operandi, per se, and, of course, the ever-popular e pluribus unum. Even more abundant are words derived from Latin roots: arena (from harena, meaning "sand"), auditorium ("a place of audience"), stadium (a running track)...and those are just the theatrical ones! It's inescapable. It's also the most daunting of languages, one that is seemingly obscure and filled with arcane rules and often accompanied by unpleasant memories of adolescence. But, as Mount says in Carpe Diem, "Knowing a bit of Latin is an invitation to the biggest room in the building, with a view down the corridor to all the succeeding ages. And you can get your hands on that invitation at any age."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 20, 2007
    ISBN9781400175246
    Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life
    Author

    Harry Mount

    Harry Mount studied ancient and modern history and classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a First. He has written a number of books including the top ten bestseller Amo, Amas, Amat and All That (Short Books), A Lust for Windowsills (Little Brown) and How England Made the English (Viking). He is a former New York correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and has written for the Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. He is now editor of The Oldie Magazine.

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    Reviews for Carpe Diem

    3.5/5

    30 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      It’s a good quick introduction for anyone who is even thinking about learning Latin. The author gets into some historical background of the language or the development of the language. He also pokes fun at certain institutions or techniques and things, but nothing in a way that I think is meant to be a vicious jab. I would say if you can get it on audio, check it out and then just get more excited about learning Latin.
    • 3/5
      If you come into this book thinking you'll walk away with an accelerated sense of Latin, you'll be sorely disappointed. Mount spends a significant amount of time discussing the declension of words, without ever explaining (unless I managed to miss it) what that means or why the reader should be inspired to care. The book jumps from topic to topic in an obvious attempt to avoid boredom, but the end result is a disorganized book that doesn't help make its case that anyone can become a classics expert.

      This, of course, isn't really a fair assessment. The idea that one can walk away from this skinny volume and say, "Veni, vidi, vici," is ridiculous. I can only blame NPR for setting my expectations to an absurdly high level. It's not a bad book, by any stretch of the imagination. Some of the trivia and digressions in the book can be rather interesting, and the book might serve well as a handy reference volume or refresher course for someone who already knows what they're doing. For my purposes, however, it was less than successful.
    • 4/5
      Now this book was full of cupiditas. Its goal is to serve as a primer for the noobs, as well as serve as a review for the dwindling number of grown-up school children who had studied Latin. It's full of corny anecdotes and examples as well has some expected, mind-numbing grammar. The lazy (like me) can skip the various figures of speech and simply enjoy all the clever examples of Latin words/phrases still in use today. Well worth a future re-reading.
    • 5/5
      This was a fun book to read. I took five years of Latin in high school, and I enjoyed delving back into the subject. Harry Mount's intention was presumably to bring people into the classics web, but there is a lot for the person who still retains some familiarity with Latin's declensions and conjugations. The grammar never becomes boring because Mount tells stories of his growing up, investigates Greek and Roman columns, complains about wankers, and displays a large list of Latin writing devices. The one missing thing is an index. I wanted to relook at the chapter on gerunds and gerundives and a had a problem finding it. I thought it might be in the vicinity of the ablative absolute, which I found every time I reopened the book. But, it's located between the chapter on the fifth declension nouns and a funny one on Bertie Wooster's Classical Education--Latin in English literature. I was wondering whether I might do some alternate translating of gerundives, and then I thought back to the time where I used Latinate phrasing in English composition class. My retort was that I was just following the Latinate style of English authors during the Augustan age (my favorites were the essays of Addison and Steele). This book is highly recommended for both the newcomer and casual Latinist.