So amidst all the craziness of 2020, I finally got in to get braces installed yesterday. If all goes well, I’ll have to wear them for 28 months. I get two upper teeth extracted on the 7th, followed by another visit to the orthodontist to finish up on the 14th.

As of two weeks ago I started learning Latin, with the goal of eventually being able to read The Aeneid by Virgil in its original language. I started now because I realized Duolingo offered it as a course. I’m doing a combination of Duolingo and Memrise to help me learn faster, with the idea that these two apps are fairly complementary.

Turns out I’m also learning a bit more about English during my learning of Latin. As in, English desperately needs an official second plural form of ‘you’. It does have one in certain regional dialects with “You all” or “y’all” (found in the south), yinz (found in pittsburgh), and yous (found in NY), and ye (found in Northern England, Cornwall, Ireland).

Technically it used to have one. That word was… ‘you’. The singular version was ‘thou’. ‘Thou’ fell out of use, and so ‘you’ pulls double duty as both the singular and the plural, which caused the English language to become even more confusing to those trying to learn it.