OT: Jingoism, Usefull Langs. et al.

1.  Are there any conlangers in the Tucson/Phoenix area?  I'll be there from
approx. March 1 thru 13th.....answer immediately if so!!  Or try
romiltz@yahoo.com  (new account; it may or may not work). (I'll be no mail
on the List from 2/23 till 3/15).  Would dearly love to travel on to the
west coast, but time and cats don't permit that.

2. Jingoism:  The public HS I attended for one year in South Dakota had
about 1000 students, probably average for a town/area of around 40,000.  The
very posh boarding school where I spent the remaining 3 years of HS had
around 450, my class was around 90.  (It also included grades 7-8, perhaps
20 in all; but they discontinued that Lower School quite a long time ago.)
In the public school you could take 2 years each of Spanish, Latin or
French. What I learned in my 1 year of Latin was equivalent to 1 semester's
work at the boarding school, as I discovered to my dismay.  That school also
offered German (and the German teacher could teach Russian if there was
demand-- there wasn't). and ancient Greek (though not in my year; I would
love to have taken it, even though parents wouldn't hear of it.  "Not
practical"). Nowadays I think Russian is a permanent addition to the
curriculum along with Japanese.  All this, of course, was in the days when
all private, and many public colleges _required_ Latin for admission.

3. Usefull Langs.  My first brush with Linguistics (aka Philology) came from
reading my grandfather's 1900 vintage encylopaedia.  Hours in the dusty
attic.  (It all started when my sister and I were trying to look up things
related to sex, and I stumbled across Sanskrit.....)

4. A very strange occurrence:  107 msgs today-- the new ones, plus reruns of
some from previous days.

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