I thought I’d take a break today from philosophy and politics to write about the thing I’m actually supposed to know something about: classical philology. I’m supposed to know Ancient Greek and Latin pretty well, given that I have a PhD in Classics and have been teaching one or another of these languages for ten years. As it happens, my Latin has always lagged far behind my Greek, largely because I’ve always been more interested in Greek philosophy and literature, and so have spent more time reading Greek. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that even after all this time, I still find myself learning things that, in hindsight, seem really obvious and make me wonder how I could possibly have failed to know this until now.

Today’s embarrassingly belated discovery: the origin of our English terms ‘minute’ and ‘second.’

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