Tempus Fugit

Despite having never taken a Latin course, it would seem that what I thought were common phrases aren't as easily recognised by the average university English student.

In the dining room of my current residence (wherein I live with three other people; all uni students, and all Canadian-born Caucasians), there's a whiteboard, where we write random notes to each other, or things of interest. The fall term having just started, we decided to clear the board of the old junk to leave room for new fun. I then decided to do something very cliché, and wrote: "[Tabula Rasa]," centered at the bottom of the board. The irony, of course, is that by writing "tabula rasa", the tabula is no longer rasa.

But apparently, the male roommate didn't make any comment, and the two female housemates thought it was a food term. It was there for a month, and nobody said anything. :( So what I hoped would be a nerdtastic joke turned into a genuine mystery for the audience.

Sometime later, in my Japanese 302 class, we were reading an article describing the perspective people have on time. (eg. "for some people, waking up 'early in the morning' means 04:23~05:27, whereas for others, it's 05:37~06:19.") We were discussing some of the terms used, and how we would translate them into English. Now, despite this being a 3rd-year language course, most of the students were in arts, and otherwise reasonably competent in English. One of the terms, which was glossed as "time flies", was under discussion, and the class explored some of the other possible phrasings available in English. Thinking I'd make a joke, I decided to suggest tempus fugit, but it seems the rest of the class didn't react at all. So not only did they not think it funny, they simply didn't get it at all. ...Or maybe I just didn't speak loudly enough.

Now, I know that Latin phrases are in sharp decline nowadays, but I thought that more of them were still floating around in the aether of modern times than our current undergraduate population would suggest.