Botanical dead languages

In Britain, a working knowledge of plant names had become one of the social graces. A young lady of genteel origins was expected to be capable of reeling off, without hesitation, the Latin binomial for any given popular flower. 

From Once upon a windowsill- a history of indoor plants, by T. Martin, Timber Press, Portland, OR

Mrs. P. was a woman of peculiar ugliness: tall, thin, stooped, with a beaky, disproportionate nose which created serious problems when one tried to focus one's eyes on the other features of her face. 

Her way of speaking was affected and almost dreamy- save when she would recite metrically long series of verses of Latin and Greek poetry. Then the modest, diminutive posture would disappear; the pin eyes would get animated; and a towering virago, flushed in the face, and short of breath, would be beating with her foot the prosody of Virgil, of Ennius, of Homer. 

 

Implacable with those of us who did not know their aorists and could not identify a given meter right away from a couple of verses, she was suave with those more talented (or simply nerdier). She would accompany then our recitation of the last part of a verse with half-voice, evidently enthusiastic that her love of classics had rubbed off on some of us.

 

I was one of the nerdier; for personal disposition, family environment, and sheer love of books, I had no problems following or getting enthusiastic about Sophocles or Plato, and could find the dirtiest of Martial's epigrams easily in the family library (of course, Mrs. P. never had us read those). 

 

It is due to the ministrations of classical wisdom from Mrs. P. that I now can pronounce my Schysmatoglottis and my Asterostigma without getting my tongue tied; why I can more or less understand what Anaphyllum means; and why these days I am finding unending pleasure in thumbing through my copy of Botanical Latin by W.T. Stearn. It is a self-described "working guide to the special kind of Latin internationally used by botanists for the description and the naming of plants". It is a splendid book, born out of the notebooks that the author compiled while on duty on a RAF ambulance during the war. It will teach one, for example, the difference between involute and convolute vernation (though, alas, it will not tell you that vernatio is 18th century Latin, from vernare, which means "to grow as if in spring"). 

If one used to know Latin and Greek, reading this book is a pleasant rendezvous with one's past. If one has not that privilege- far from a snobbish one, it is one of the few that really bring a pleasure irrespective of the perceived social importance- it is a good occasion to peer into a world where words mean what they say. 

Like a Borges' character, lose yourself into a quiet and engrossing intellectual endeavour.