Weekly English Words with Alisha Intermediate Latin Phrases
Welcome again to this show. Weekly Words. Try that again. Hi, welcome back to Weekly
Words. I’m Alisha, and I have no idea what I’m going to talk about yet. Intermediate
Latin phrases. This is gonna be fun.
“Bona fide.” It sounds like an American thing, like we bastardized that word a little bit.
“Bona fide” then means something that’s genuine or something that’s, um, truly representative
of something else. So if someone says he’s a “bona fide gentleman,” for example, it means
he’s truly a gentleman. I don’t hear this
word very often, at least among the people
I spend time with. Perhaps you might hear it, especially in an old movie, I think.
“Vice versa.” “Vice versa” means… Basically it just means to switch positions of something,
so you might say, “Oh, I could come to your house and then we could go…” Oh, this is
a terrible example. “I could go to your house, or vice versa,” meaning you come to my house,
so saying vice versa, it leaves the listener
to fill in the opposite of whatever else you’re
saying. Yeah, that’s actually kind of a useful phrase that’s still used quite a lot. I
hear it a lot in business English.
“Alma mater. “Alma mater?” “Alma mater.”
Alma mater just refers to the college
that you graduated from, so whatever it is
whatever it is, whatever university it is,
you could be from, you know, Harvard University. You would say, “Oh, Harvard is my alma mater.”
That’s it.
“Carpe diem.” “Carpe diem.” “Carpe diem” means seize the day, so it’s kind of a, um, a motivating
phrase. Um, you can say it when you leave the house for work, for example, if you’re
feeling like you need an extra
bit of motivation, you might say, “Ah, carpe
diem!” to yourself.
“Status quo.” Status quo” refers to the norm or whatever is the regular in society, for
example, right now let see, what’s this, what’s the status quo? I don’t know. Politics.
That won’t infuriate anybody. So maybe in
one place, the status quo might be to eat
vegan. Oh, it’s… “Eating vegan is the
status quo.”
End. Okay, well thats it, So I hope that you
learned something I certainly did. My Latin
is apparently very lacking, but thanks for
joining us and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye!