Back when LBJ was in the White House (remember when we referred to our Presidents by their initals?), I attended a prestigious Jesuit high school in New York City that was so exclusive that to get in you had to graduate in the top 5 percent of your grammar school class (I did) or have parents willing to donate at least $50,000 to the school's building fund (I didn’t).
This school was so advanced that in addition to offering all the normal courses, you could take, among other things, computer science (this was at a time when the average computer was the same size as the school's gymnasium), filmmaking (a hideout for jocks), Russian literature (where no one could remember the characters' names because all the consonants made them virtually unpronounceable), and the classical languages, as in Latin and Greek.
I was a classics major because the science curriculum made you take lab where you dealt with things like formaldehyde and eviscerated cats. Latin was tough, but Greek because of its unique alphabet was another kettle of fish.Each day we would start Greek class by studying declensions and practicing vocabulary, while the last 20 minutes of the class was reserved for reading and translating. Most of us could stumble through the reading part because the language is phonetic, but translating was a sheer nightmare.
To manage, virtually everyone in the class (at least anyone you admitted being friends with) used a ballpoint pen with a very fine tip to print the English translation between the lines. So as not to make this obvious, when you were called on to translate you purposefully made it seem like you were having a hard time, occasionally even missing a few words. There was truly an art to this and some performances were worthy of Olivier. You couldn’t translate too fast or Mr. Sullivan would become suspect and ask you which word was spear, which was barbarian, and so forth. And you couldn’t translate too slowly or he'd conclude you hadn't prepared your lesson and give you an extra assignment for that evening. Investment bankers haven't known such pressure.
One of my fondest memories of Greek class was the time we took a mid-term exam and a student, whom I will simply call Tom to keep him from being laughed out of his community, wrote vocabulary words all over his left hand and forearm. Tom was a lineman on the football team and because of his size sat in the back of the class, where cheating was as rampant as dysentery in a Third World country. It must have taken him more than three hours of painstaking printing to get all his crib notes in place.
As the time for the exam grew close, Tom was afraid that his palms would begin to perspire and he'd lose all the idioms, which were the hardest to remember. He was also careful not to drag the outside base of his hand across the desktop lest he smudge the masculine, feminine and neuter case endings.
The test lasted two hours. Tom seemed to have made it undetected and had a passing grade all but guaranteed. Unfortunately, in his haste to turn in his exam he rushed to the front of the room and presented his bluebook to Mr. Sullivan with (you knew this was coming, right?) his left hand. As Homer (Simpson, not the ancient poet) might have said, “D’oh!”
And then there was the famous incident of Frank and Vinnie, two classmates during the years I wrestled with this arcane language. Frank was an average student who, like me, bypassed science class believing that if God had wanted us to see the insides of animals He would have put them on the outside of their bodies. Vinnie landed in Greek class because it reminded him of all those gladiator movies starring Victor Mature.
One day, Vinnie missed class and called Frank's' house that evening to get the homework assignment. The conversation went this way:
Frank's mother, answering the phone: Hello.
Vinnie: Hello, is Frank there?
Frank's mother: Do you want Frank senior or Frank junior?
Vinnie: No, I want Frank sophomore.
Vinnie is a money manager now. Be advised.
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