Words I'm Not Looking Up (Because the Magical Fantastical Computer Box Thingy Is Looking Them Up for Me)

sui generis

Reading Paul Krugman's Sunday New York Times column today (better late than never), I came across this "sui generis." Terms like this used to frustrate me and make me feel like a dink for not taking Latin. But thanks to the magical, mystical computer box thingy, my days of stumbling over words like qua and quo and pro and ipso may be over.

I moved my cursor over the unfamiliar term and one of those little question marks popped up. It was a link straight to an online dictionary that said:

su·i ge·ne·ris (sū'ī' jĕn'ər-ĭs, sū'ē) adj.
Being the only example of its kind; unique.

He was talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, by the way, and not 24 hours after I saw my esteemed governor buck naked in CGI form on the big screen, his fiscal assets obscured only by a little mist.

He's sui generis all right. And, though I don't know Latin, I'd venture to say that he's lots of things with the word "corpus," too. (Though lately his posteriori is looking a lot less delicto.)

Hmmm ...

Here's an interesting quotation from an article in yesterday's New York Times:

“In some ways, it’s really frustrating,” he said. “I’ll hear someone say
something that isn’t grammatically correct and I’ll cringe.”

What's interesting is that the "he" in "he said" is not a 75-year-old retiree longing for the good old days of split-infinitives prohibitions and circling said crimes in his local newspaper. "He" is Max Gordon, a high school sophomore.

It's the one disconcerting bit in an otherwise encouraging article reporting that the number of students taking Latin is on the rise -- somewhat -- in Westchester schools and even nationwide.

They tell me that's good news. And I suspect they're right. I wouldn't know. In Pinellas Park, Florida, schools in the 1970s we didn't study Latin. We were more like young scholars in the field of "Gilligan's Island," sometimes with a minor in "Love Boat."