There have been numerous attempts in recent years to brush the cobwebs off Latin but none has approached the task with such chutzpah as the newly published X-treme Latin by Henry Beard.
Subtitled “All the Latin you need to know for surviving the 21st century”, the book offers useful phrases including “Age, catamite - fac mihi hunc diem felicissimum” (“Go ahead, punk, make my day”) and “Praescriptum meum domesticum per vim in fibres redactum est a sodalitate quae terrore pro Terra utitur” (“My homework was forcibly recycled by eco-terrorists”). One chapter even offers suggestions for “Collocutio inter Colonoscopiam” (“Small talk during a colonoscopy”)!
Sadly, with four pages on the finer grammatical points of telling someone to procreate with themselves and an appendix filled with more obscene language than the most puerile of teenage scholars could ever wish for, its suitability for school libraries is highly questionable.
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