Forest Spell

“She accepted the tea he had brought, with a word of thanks and a charming smile, but could not resist the impulse to ask him if he was not ravished by Neroli’s voice.
He replied promptly: ‘Not entirely. A little too much vibrato, don’t you agree?’
‘Ah, I perceive that you are an expert!’ said Abby, controlling a quivering lip. ‘You must enlighten my ignorance, sir! What does that mean, if you please?’
‘Well, my Latin is pretty rusty, but I should think it means to tremble,’ he said coolly. ‘She does, too, like a blancmanger. And much the same shape as one,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘Oh, you dreadful creature!’ protested Mrs Grayshott, bubbling over. ‘I didn’t mean that, when I said I thought she had rather too much vibrato! You know I didn’t!’
‘I thought she had too much of everything,’ he said frankly.”
― Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep

“It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“A Roman centurion walks into a bar and orders a martinus.

The bartender says, "Don't you mean a martini?"

The centurion answers, "If I wanted a double I would have ordered it.”
― Harlan Wolff