The Know-It-All, One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the Worldby A.J. Jacobs. Here is what he reveals about Ben Johnson:
I knew a lot of things could save your life -- a helmet, a good lawyer, cholesterol medication -- but this one was new to me: the ability to read Latin. If you know you E Pluribus from your Unum you'll live a lot longer. At least if you're an accused criminal in 16th - century England, as was Ben Jonson.
I remembered Jonson vaguely -- he was the second most successful Elizabethan Playwright after Shakespeare, the Pepsi to the Bard's Coke. What I didn't know was that he was a rascal -- an angry, stubborn man with a homicidal temper. In 1958, the same year he had his first big hit play -- Every Man His
Humour -- Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel.
The strange part, though, is how he escaped capital punishment. The accused playwright invoked a legal loophole called "benefit of clergy." The concept of benefit of clergy started in 12th century England when the church convinced the
king to offer immunity to priest and other ecclesiastical officials. By the 16th century, however, the definition of "clergy" had stretched to include anyone who could read the Fifty-First Psalm in Latin.
On the one hand, this is a crazy law -- elitist, unjust, arbitrary. On the other hand, it's kind of nice that reading and scholarship were once so highly valued that they had the very tangible benefit of stopping a hatchet from removing your head from your shoulders. It's beautifully clear-cut: You read Latin, you live. You don't read Latin, you'll soon be experiencing a nice case of rigor mortis (though you won't know the definition of rigor mortis, you illiterate jackass).
See it pays to learn Latin.Which is why I'm still plodding through Wheelock's Latin.
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