Class composition.

For my Latin class, the class composition is -

- mostly male.
- mostly college age / early 20s.
- mostly into Classics (e.g. one reads Homer on breaks, a large number of them tend to chew with their mouths open and be on the hairy side with poor grooming skills).

An exception is an older guy who's a Latin teacher and his daughters (I think) and their friends, and he wears some sort of scapular thing (I could see it on under his shirt), and the girls wear long skirts in simple, sedate patterns, and one of them is named "Iacintha" or whatever the heck that one kid from the Fatima apparitions was named.

In addition, there's a couple younger guys from like Notre Dame or something who know them (I'm assuming from conservative Catholic circles?).

The kids talk a lot to the priest, but mostly about Cicero or "what do you think of Catallus?", and when I ask about modern church politics, they usually take some minor minor thread of the conversation and derail it with requests for trivia-like information that classicists are so fond of and could probably wikipedia (e.g. with, "Has there ever been a non-Italian pope before Benedict?", or, "Has there ever been a pope from the mendicant orders?").

They also do the thing that classicists do and look weirdly upon other eras of Latin like church Latin. "Did they really do that?", one asked with mouth open, when he saw a new use of a conjunction that seemed odd to him.

I think one of the biggest flaws of Classics is that classicists (like most people who never think about moral topics) don't understand the difference between analysis (i.e. description leading into argumentation, but no moral judgments) and evaluation (i.e. moral judgments), and so they don't see that their field involves a very normative decisions about the height of Latin or Greek, and so although some people may slum with koine Greek and the non-literary papyri from Egypt or something like that, they would *never* start to study Christian literature in their departments, even when it's contemporaneous with other stuff they study.

Honestly, what the fuck is up with that? You would never get away with such snobbery in English departments or other modern language departments, where people have been actively trying to de-center the canon while they teach it. Classics is so behind the times that it's sick.

Also, when the priest talked about knowing the importance of vowel length if you want to speak Latin or read it out loud correctly, and for that you have to consult the dictionary and memorize - "You have to know everything!", he says - one asked where the dictionaries got it, and the priest said that alternate vowel lengths in dictionary entries usually indicate options for poetic usage, and after that, I politely chimed in and said that another important source for accents/vowel lengths for a language like Latin is to make reconstructions from daughter languages, and also check them against reconstructions of Indo-European roots, to the extent that that is known, and the priest was like, "Oh yes, definitely," and then mentioned you can also look at the treatment of the vowels of Greek words borrowed into Latin.

Honestly, the difference between a classicist and someone who knows his shit is the decision to stop idolizing trivia and learn the damn system that lets you make sense of all the shit you've memorized (the same is probably true of egyptology as a whole, too, from what I've seen of it).