Fun with Latin at Work and Home

Visitors to our company are usually surprised by the size of our offices. Also by things like the "Chart of Metabolic Processes" which hangs by my desk, and the Latin Dictionary and the anatomy books and the Chesterton books on the shelf. We explain that about seven years ago we started using "thirteenth century metaphysics" and "subsidiarity" in order to get things done, and they put this off as jargon for the latest tech fad - but then they see our monitors with the Latin slogans in the corner... One customer doesn't quite believe any of this is real, but I am told they are pleased with the results, so they just shrug and put some more sugar in their coffee.

Anyway, yesterday my boss came up with a new witty slogan for me to translate into Latin to put into our main monitoring software (yes, we use Latin at our high-tech company - don't you?) - so when I got home last night I got out the very handy 501 Latin Verbs to check an ending (I'm a computer scientist, after all, et paucos verbos Latinorum teneo... but I do what I can with some good books!) Anyway, as is usually the case with most books, I sat for a while and looked through it, marvelling at all the thousands of things I was not looking for (as GKC says about encyclopedias in The Common Man 240). And I had to laugh at some of the first-person singular present active indicatives, certain of which I had seen before, but in English. Some are quite funny, so I am posting them here for your amusement.


ago - I do
audio - I hear
condo - I establish
demo - I take away
disco - I learn
do - I give
fido - I trust
for - I talk
gusto - I taste
intro - I enter
labor - I slip, glide
lego - I choose, read
loco - I place
minor - I threaten
no - I swim
oleo - I smell
radio - I furnish with spokes
repo - I creep
sector - I keep following
sum - I am
sumo - I take up
video - I see
volvo - I roll

This smells like a poem, so I might try that after I finish upgrading our software with the new slogan. (If you want to know it, however, you'll probably have to schedule a visit our company... hee hee)