Nothing bored me more during the summer of 2008 than the prospect of studying Latin grammar. I needed a foreign language as part of my high-school curriculum, and I was loath to choose a dead one.

At Loyola High School in the 1950s, I didn’t find studying Latin as exhilarating as Gerard Gayou found it years later (“The Guiding Light of Latin Grammar,” Houses of Worship, June 23). I ...

Data, as every child at a grammar school once knew, is the plural of Latin’s datum, “something given”.Originally that plural sense was carried over into English. But already in 1702, the ...