Nouns and Verbs, Verbs and Nouns: the Chiasmic Wheels that Turn the Stars
You should know I aced an advanced course in pedagogy in which we learned how to identify what our students don't know or have forgotten or thought too confusing, trivial, or nonsensical to be on the test -- thinking, perhaps, the teacher surely will have mercy. Wrong! The objective of the course was to identify such lacunae and then test the students on them. If your antennae are atwitter and you have the necessary WIQ (Wichian Intelligent Quotient), you already know I will ask you what the heck 'lacunae' are, albeit only on the Mighty Miscellany aka the Real Test. You don't want to be caught lacking or slacking. Thus, it is said, that it is possible to drown in a puddle of water. For those less equipped with WIQ that last sentence relates intimately to 'lacunae'. How do you study for such marginalia? Be curious, be playful, and if you don't know the actual answer, makeup something that will bring a gleam to your teacher's eye. Once when a student (Bryce might not want me to mention his name and would perhaps even protest this preterition), whose performance on a test was otherwise characteristically deplorable (Hilary's word), found an opportunity on the test to write this never-to-be-forgotten gem: Truth is to Factual as Synonym is to Cinnamon. Clearly, He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named's WIQ was exceptionally high and waltzed right into an A+, which is, as we all know, the end all and be all of studentdom. So let it be written! If all this is confusing or disorienting, Welcome To My World.
Here are the more mundane live-or-die minutiae that will allow you to reach the longed-for Hinterlands:
- Know the noun chart perfectly!
- Be able to demonstrate an understanding of the 'uses' of each of the cases! (Question: (If the verb do or narro or demonstro is in the sentence, what case should you watch out for?)
- Know the ProScadies perfectly! Don't let your 'ex' be your downfall. Such an 'aberration' would be 'atypical' of your otherwise excellent preparation.
- Know the PAIN words perfectly and be able to explain why they are a pain in painstaking details. Ouch!
- Know not only the 'official' vocabulary of Chapters I and II, but also the additional words in the Sententiae of each chapter! You won't want to be caught eating 'biscuits' in the commissary. You will not be 'exonerated'!
- Be able to translate the principal parts of a verb!
- Know how to write out the principal parts of any regular but otherwise unfamiliar 1st and 2nd conjugation verb.
- Be able to conjugate a 1st or 2nd conjugation verb in the present tense.
- Is it 'essential' to know 'amo is to amare' as 'sum' is to '_________'?
- Know the rule for forming singular and plural imperatives, positive and negative! (Are there other possibilities to these seemingly binary categories? WIQ Alert)
- Know whether 'is' or 'are' is a linking or helping verb and the difference it makes in Latin! What's wrong with, Cur est magister currit in circulis? (i.e., not what is wrong with your magister but with the sententia ipsa).
- Know how to change an adjective to an adverb in Latin.( I was laetus/laeta, Mr. HImwich, until I saw how laetēyou were running circles around us.)
- Know how to use the two enclitics you have learned, -que and -ne? (Theoretically, could there be others? Are there such enclitics in English? Anyone's guess is as good as another's) (Love these double parentheses!)).
What else can you do to prepare?
- Translate the English sentences back into Latin in the answers for the self-tutorial exercises for Chapters I and II.
- Be resourceful! Often on a test, a detail you can't remember may be found waving a red flag elsewhere on the test.
- The way to OZ is paved in macrons.
- Know what you don't know and study that! It's useless to tell me you don't know what you don't know just as it is pointless to study over and over what you already know. It may be comforting to do so, but it won't get you where you want to go even if you don't know where that is (that was the motto of the aforementioned graduate course called 'Not Knowing Is Not An Option' (unless, of course, you have some playfulness in you like these double parentheses )), (better yet, now triple!))). It was also in that same course I learned the life-defying dicta, "Memorization is a socially accepted form of cheating' and the never to be forgotten but oft-repeated like some backward Ave Maria, "Anything less than perfection is complete and utter failure', which has as its derivative, “The only A’s you’ll get in this course are the A’s in your name'.
There is a pluraplenty (Is that a neologism?!) of MM on this page. On Tuesday, I'll lend you Tristen, that Know-It-All, for 15 short minutes. After three years with me, she has learned how to live with this nonsense and knows the byways round and about what may euphemistically be called my mind-brain.