In Vermont, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin wrote a letter to the Minority Leader of the Vermont Senate suggesting that Vermont should have a Latin motto, in addition to -- but not replacing -- the official English motto ("Freedom and Unity"). So, the people involved came up with this:
Stella quarta decima fulgeat. The translation: “May the Fourteenth Star Shine Bright,” is a nod to Vermont’s status as the fourteenth state to join the union. Nice. Poetic in both languages.
So then the legislature passes a resolution, which takes very little time and costs no money. Right? Wrong. Guess what happened next?
Here's a post about the story from a Vermont blog: No good deed goes unpunished. Apparently a local TV station did a story about it and got a huge number of incredibly ignorant comments on their Facebook page, here: WCAX: One state senator thinks Vermont should have a Latin motto. What do you think?.
The crazies came out of the woodwork: "If you live in the United States, you need to learn English!" "Vermont ain't no Latino area." "This is America, not Mexico or some other Latin-American country." And so on.
The stupid... it burns.
Apparently these people don't know that "E Pluribus Unum" is a Latin phrase. Or that Latin was the language of educated people until well into the Medieval Period. Or that prior to Martin Luther (Germany) or Wycliffe or Tyndale or King James (England) you pretty much had to read the Bible in Latin. It helped if you knew Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, too.
I'd love to hear what that eighth-grade girl thinks of all of this.
I'd also love to hear what the Tea Party will say when they learn that all of our math classes are using numerals invented by Arabs (because they're better than Roman numerals (insert Super Bowl joke here)).