So I was telling my friend, Zinzi, about how cool our Latin class is... She's not sure she believes me. She had 2 years of Latin in Catholic school and hated every second of it. I asked her if it was because she had a mean nun for a teacher or something, but she said, no, it was all that grammar that made her hate it. This coming from a woman who took Organic Chemistry without having taken the Chemistry pre-reqs and ended up with an A-! Oy! She had me very nervous before the semester began with her Latin horror stories, but I think we're all doing alright so far, if the in-class exercises are any way to judge.

This is off topic, but Zinzi would like me to ask you, Professor Manolaraki, how to spell "panacea" in ancient Greek letters. She wants to get a tattoo of it on her ankle before she begins a grad school program next year. She wants to be a research scientist, studying viruses and infectious disease, so I guess it's appropriate. I tried to look up how "panacea" might be spelled in ancient Greek and the best I could come up with was Pi-Alpha-Nu-Alpha-Kappa-Epsilon-Iota-Alpha. Did I get it right?

~Rachael Stern