Sumus Agricolae!

In high school there was a foreign language requirement.  The choices were French and Spanish, until my freshman year when a Latin teacher was added to the faculty.    Based on the advice of my older sisters, who had both taken Spanish at that school, as well as the stories I’d heard about the French teacher, monsieur Blanc, whose students were fluent enough in French to speak sentences such as, “mon crayon es large,” I thought it prudent to go the Latin route.

I spent three years studying Latin under one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.  One of the many things I liked about his class was the fact that he allowed us to work together on in-class assignments.  When assignments were handed out we all broke down into our little groups to work on translations.

There were three of us in our pretty sharp group: Becca, Ryan, and I.  We, by and large, blew through our assignments while working together, despite quite a bit of goofing off.  Our teacher let us screw around a bit because we completed our assignments and they were generally correct. 

Eventually the three of us decided to create our own, ad hoc, Latin club.  At my insistence, we chose the motto “sumus agricolae!”  For those of you who don’t know Latin, the statement means, “we are farmers!”  The choice was a non sequitur; it had nothing to do with any of us or the fact that we were Latin students.   I just liked the idea of throwing a fist in the air and shouting, “sumus agricolae!”  We are farmers!

The sentence was also chosen because it was in the first assignment in our Latin textbook.  As I assume it to be in most foreign language classes in high school, you begin by being introduced to a verb and a handful of nouns.  Then you get introduced to how to conjugate that verb and decline the nouns.  Finally you take those first couple of lessons and apply them in a simple assignment where you do simple translations paying attention to cases, voices, and moods.

As I watch a lot of football on TV I am subjected to a lot of advertising.  One of the sponsors I see a lot is an insurance company called Farmers Insurance.  The current Farmers advertising campaign contains the motto, “we are Farmers,” followed by an A Capella jingle.  Every time I see that commercial I think of that old Latin club and the people I used to work with in class.  I also wonder, does that commercial invoke high school memories in Ryan or Becca too?