Latin for All Occasions: Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus - Tapa dura

'Was I speaking Latin again?'
'Denuone Latine loquebar?'
'Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.'
'Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.'

Who says Latin is a dead language? Certainly not any former altar boys, public schoolboy, or any girl who ever dreamed of being Audrey Hepburn in 'A Nun's Story'. The Roman mass may be a thing of the past, but Latin's never been livelier – thanks to Henry Beard, former prisoner of the classics and best-selling author of 'Sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary' and 'Miss Piggy's Guide to Life'. He's come up with an essential tool to vindicate anyone who's ever winged it through mass or struggled with the ablative. Here, in one handy, easy-to-use volume are hundreds of everyday English expressions rendered into grammatically accurate, idiomatically correct classical Latin – with a complete, easy-to-use pronunciation guide. And all of these practical phrases are conventionally organized into familiar conversational categories, so that you can be confident that in any social situation some suitable Latin 'bona dicta' (bon mots) will be right at your fingertips.

'Latin for all Occasions' gives you the perfect phrase for every contemporary situation, from starting a relationship ('Frequentasne hunc locum?' 'Do you come here often?') to classic movie quotes ('Fac ut gaudeam!' 'Make my day!') through bumper stickers, personal ads, sports terms, answering machine messages, cocktail party chitchat, and much, much more.

The next time you feel like using the immortal language of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace to turn an ordinary remark into a timeless utterance, don't let 'feles, felis, feli, felem, fele' (the cat) get your tongue. Just pull out a copy of 'Latin for all Occasions'.

'Bona fortuna!' (Good luck!)

Henry Beard spent eight harrowing years studying Latin. After cofounding the English-language periodical 'National Lampoon' and writing a number of books in English, including 'Sailing: A Sailor's Dictionary' and 'Miss Piggy's Guide to Life', he is happy finally to have an opportunity to make some use of his knowledge of a language that really hasn't been all that helpful over the years, except for the time he suddenly realized that the thing he was about to order from the menu of a restaurant in Rome looked an awful lot like the Latin word for 'eel'. Mr. Beard resides in Novi Eboraci (New York).

Henry Beard was the founder and one of the original editors of ‘National Lampoon’. He is the author of a number of bestselling books, including ‘French for Cats’, ‘Poetry for Cats’, ‘Latin for All Occasions’, ‘O.J.’s Legal Pad’ and ‘Zen for Cats’.