Romy Negrin - Dulce et Decorum

 

Hello. So, at my school, there are some kids who take Latin. We call them losers. [audience laughter] Some of those kids have gone the extra mile and joined the competitive Latin team. We call them pathetic losers. I am one such pathetic loser. [audience laughter] I started taking Latin in seventh grade. I was like, “Oh, it'll be fun and ancient, whatever.” [audience laughter] Everyone I knew was like, "Don't take Latin. It's a dead language. Who are you going to speak to in Latin, the Pope?” Someday. [audience laughter] But I started taking Latin, and I fell in love with it. Aww. [audience laughter] 

 

At the beginning of eighth grade, my Latin teacher was like, "Hey, you should join Certamen, the competitive Latin team." Certamen, for those of you who do not know, means competition in Latin, because you go to competitions to do Latin. And I was like, “Sure.” So, I joined the Certamen team. It's me and three other kids in the novice team. We start practicing for the first big competition of the year, Yale. They have these competitions at all the big universities. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, where you expect this sort of thing to be. [audience laughter] 

 

We start practicing, and the big day finally arrives. We gather at Grand Central at 05:30 in the morning. Too early. But we do not care, because we are off to New Haven. New Haven, Connecticut. [audience laughter] What a town. [audience laughter] So, we get on the train. One of my friends has brought along this ball of chocolate, this big, huge sphere of chocolate, wrapped in the shiniest tin foil you ever did see. [audience laughter] We agreed as a team that we would eat that chocolate if and only if we made it to semifinals. So, that is an extra incentive, other than the fact that I am inherently competitive by nature. And there is glory in victory. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we are on the train and we are practicing. We are conjugating our verbs like, porto, portas, portat, portamus, portatis, portant. [audience laughter] We are singing our song, Row, row, your emperors. [audience laughter] My Latin teacher is just there, and she is like, “Yay, we are all going to have fun.” And I was like, “Yeah, winning would be fun.” [audience laughter] 

 

We finally arrive at Yale. Every competition starts off with a lecture, where they bring in one of the classics faculty to give us a talk about Roman pottery to get us into the competition mood. [audience laughter] That is like the start of the day. And then, they ask you questions about Roman history, mythology, Latin vocabulary, grammar, literature, basically everything.

 

And so, we go to the lecture. After the lecture, they tell us that they have pioneered this fun new system, a bracket system, where for each division, novice, intermediate and advanced, there will be two brackets. An A bracket for people who have been to a Certamen before, and a B bracket for people who had no idea what they were doing. We clearly belonged in the B bracket, because we had never done it before. We are like, “Off we go to the B bracket.” But the B bracket would only send one team to semifinals, while the A bracket would send eight teams to semifinals. Yeah. [audience laughter] You can all do math. [audience laughter] 

 

So, after the lecture they say, “Hold on a minute. One of the teams from the A bracket is not here. Would one of the teams from the B bracket like to join the A bracket?” We looked at each other and we are like, “Eight is greater than one.” [audience laughter] So, we are like, “We will join the A bracket, please.” So, we switched. We are high-fiving ourselves about this decision that we have made. We skip along off to our first round where we meet our first challengers, Acton-Boxborough. 

 

Acton-Boxborough is the name of their school. Just think about that. Five syllables. [audience laughter] So many syllables. You know it has to be pretentious. [audience laughter] And they were. Their team was comprised of a junior and a senior in the novice division. And we are in eighth grade. [audience laughter] And the senior is flirting with the moderator, because the moderator is just like a sophomore at Yale. [audience laughter] Yeah. So, he is like, "Who is your favorite Roman poet?" And she is like, "I like Ovid." And he is like, "Ovid? I love Ovid." [audience laughter]

 

 am just looking at my friends like, "Ovid?" I have never read Ovid. I am still stuck on Book Two of the Cambridge Latin Course. [audience laughter] A great read if you ever have the chance. [audience laughter] So, that is Round One. But we actually do pretty well in Round One. So, Round Two. Our fiercest competitors yet, Oak Hall. Only two syllables, but one of the syllables is Hall. [audience laughter] Just contemplate that. They are buzzing in before the questions are finished. It is like, "In what year did the emperor--” “123 AD." [audience laughter] "What is the ablative singular form of--" “Pane." And it is like, “How did they know?”

 

The reason they know is because they have a coach, Adam. Adam, he ties his long hair back in a ponytail and he wears this flannel and he stares those children dead in the eyes. [audience laughter] God forbid, they should get a question wrong, because then Adam has something to say about it. He goes, "Excuse me, but actually, in Virgil's Aeneid Book 1, line 324, he uses the alternative poetic form of the word, which is the form that Keegan answered with." [audience laughter] Keegan is your name if you go to Oak Hall, I guess. "So, Keegan deserves to be awarded those points." 

 

What is this moderator going to do? She is 19. It is the middle of a Saturday afternoon. So, she is just like, "Yeah, I guess." So, Oak Hall thrashes us. But the preliminaries end and we actually feel pretty good about our score. We are looking at each other like, “We think we are going to make it to semis.” We are looking at our chocolate like, “We are going to eat you.” [audience laughter] We are just waiting for them to post the scores. We are waiting, we are waiting and we were like "Eighth place or better. Eighth place or better. Eighth place or better." And they post the scores. We are in ninth place. [audience aww] I know. I know. 

 

The worst part, the most worst part, is we looked at our score and we looked at the top score from the B bracket. And yeah, you can guess, our score was higher than the top score in the B bracket. So, had we remained in the B bracket, we would have advanced to semifinals. Argh. [audience laughter] My Latin teacher is like, "Ninth out of eighteen. That is pretty good. Let us get back on the train." [audience laughter] And we are like, “Not good enough.” We are looking at each other and we are looking at that chocolate and we are like, “Oh, we did not deserve this chocolate.” But I will be damned if we did not eat it anyway. And we swore that next time, we would earn it. Thank you.