Hi! I just had a random linguistic question. I was thinking of terms like “alma mater” and graduation designations like “cum laude” etc. and even in academic writing we commonly have phrases like “ad hominem” or “ad nauseum”. Why have these terms persisted in English societies, and where did integration of them with academia come from?
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It started out as gatekeeping: when my ancestors couldn’t bully people for being poor any more, they bullied them for not speaking Latin. Also for ages all the science and law was in Latin: it was literally the *lingua franca*, the language of the Franks (mediaeval word for most of what we’d call Europeans today). Universities taught in Latin then for the same reason many courses have very significant elements in English today.
These days it’s aesthetics. *Mathematical Methods for Scientists* is my boring-ass textbook. *Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica* is this ancient and weighty tome by famous nerd Isaac Newton, and nobody mentions that’s the same title.
It’s also kind of a code: *brachistochrone* is a concept I’d need loads of words for if I didn’t have this handy Greek jargon. And it has happened to words we’re all familiar with too, like *telephone* and *helicopter*. Latin and Greek let us make up a posh sounding name for something right quick, and knowing them lets us decode someone else’s posh name too. For example, I am not a lawyer, but I know that *stare decisis* means that a decision of some sort is standing around.
It’s not perfect, but we genuinely need some kind of source of jargon, and using dead languages is better than using living ones and occasionally having foreign colleagues fall about laughing.
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