'LER ABOUT TOWN

'LER ABOUT TOWN Prehende tuam togam, vulsisti * Get your tongue around the lingo of love: Latin. Everyone's at it these days, says Gavanndra Hodge hen is a dead language not dead? When swaggering billionaire CEOs are quoting it at board meetings, fashionable new classes are sold out and celebrities are scrawling it all over their bodies. Mirabile dictu! Latin is back. As an early-adopting paella. I have long been aware of the life- and love-affuming benefits of the language of Caesar. For nearly a decade I have been attending a hedonistic salon of Latin speakers, all swanky graduates with MBAs and books published, where we indulge in the saucier gobbets of Ovid and Juvenal. I even had a I sc-themed birthday parry, attending as the great virgin, Diana the huntress. But my passion for Plutarch no longer seems so esoteric At the Idler Academy in Notting Hill, a new course run by the Latin mistress Miss Hislop and aided by parse master Harry Mount (whose memoir Arno, Ames, Amat.. And All That was a publishing sensation in 2006) was filled to the rafters with novitiates hoping to discipline their brains. Furthermore, your toga, you've pulled p legend has it that to celebrate the I Facebook user, the cool cats in Palo of all toga panics. Imagine the scent resplendent in a white sheet. pert n on either knee, the finest Budweiser a programmer doing something ern with a BlackBerry... But who could ham such decadence? My guess is Marcus himself, for although he may look like IT seeks, he listed Latin as one of his his Harvard application and has a fo Virgil. Which suggests that the richest has a wilder, more bacchanalian side would have us believe. For this, surely, is the reason for oar in Latin. Those crazy Romans just to party lots of wine, girls in flimsy anyone who has mistakenly flicked series Spartano: Blood and Sand Romans liked to do most of all was 'Remember that "Roma" is "amen' Something the Romans themselves explains Mary Beard, Cambridge and media don ccuaortlinaire. And that Latin is the only language in verbal paradigm is “amo, amas, so the erotic dimension is built into And reflect that without Latin we such indispensable words as fellatio Roman history presents us with most depraved characters: the who gilded her nipples, wore a so enthusiastic a whore (brothel that she wore our her patrons; swimming-pools with nubile dived in (Jeffrey Epstein, dream on). much of their time naked, oiling eacks then scraping each other off in the a pre-Christian society and Roman encourage people to be ashamed of celebrated beautiful bodies. Ju the gods, would ravish anything that swans. So when Chris Martin of degree in Latin and Greek at liCL) always trying to work out what He or know if it is Allah or Jesus or M But I'd go for Zeus,' knowinge Of course. Latin chat-up lines Succede videquense aliquando (Come up and see me some time) Didici hunt ludum in Achim! (I learnt this trick in Thailand!) Orgia sunt in tunics mea et invitaris (There's an orgy in my trousers and you're invited) awe trimtsis in sinum tuum, au: mock pkcet tibi me videte (Is that a trireme in your pocket or arc you just pleased to see me?) arr, *q. greater Johnson CI war almost..• and Greek for now I am in bus in mayor may cup of rich, bra to cavort hot on talk of the sta EFTA01164868