That is nowhere near true. Latin is hit-and-miss among public schools in Chicago (and it is completely and utterly wrong to say that it’s “safe to say that no one in America who went to a public school […] would ever have taken Latin.” Not even close–I can’t even begin to think where you got that idea from. Many public schools are way better than private or parochial schools.), but there is a two-year foreign language requirement to graduate from Chicago public high schools. This varies by state, but it’s not unusual for states to have a foreign language requirement for high school graduation. Here’s a 2010 list of state requirements.
No Latin here. But I have had / experienced:
[ul]
[li] One university semester of Italian[/li][li] Two years French (1 HS and 1 university)[/li][li] Lifelong exposure to signage in Spanish, as well as headlines seen in newspaper machines and on buses/trains[/li][li] Enough historic and comparative linguistics to know the broad patterns of change as Late Latin evolved into the various Romance languages[/li][li] Lifelong interest in paleoanthropology and vertebrate taxonomy (exposure to scientific names)[/li][/ul]
I probably know as much about Latin as is possible without actually knowing the language, although I would be utterly unable to translate Vergil, or name the noun declensions with examples of each. But I am intimately familiar with all the prefixes and other word parts commonly used in English, and this has been reinforced by my knowledge of German. For example, subject (as of a monarch) is someone who is “thrown under”; the German word Untertan parses almost the same, meaning literally “done under”.
This sort of knowledge maps well to Spanish. Without really knowing that language either I know what its participles look like. I sussed immediately that the city name of Escondido, to which I recently moved, means “hidden” in Spanish.
Which it is.
At Princeton University, it is traditional for the Salutatorian to give their address in Latin (while the other students are provided with crib notes for how to respond (laugh, applaud, etc.) and when to do so.
I took Latin freshman year in a Catholic High School, & found it helpful with biology.
Nunc scripsi totum, Pro Christi da mihi potum.
I live in the US, and don’t know Latin as a language.
I haven’t checked, but there’s probably a college nearby that teaches it.
I don’t know what ignis means, exactly, but I know it’s a latin root used in words related to fire or to catching fire.
I picked it up by reading when I should have been doing other things. It probably helped that I like reading the dictionary and will sometimes look up words I know just to see what the etymology is.
The phrase at the top is one I picked up reading about medieval calligraphy and illumination. It’s a commonly found piece of marginalia. I don’t have it memorized, I just remember bits of it and know how to look up the rest.
I was taught to sing in Latin, not to speak it. You pick up some limited vocabulary, but in no way do you learn to be conversant in it. I know next to nothing about Latin grammar.
The same goes for German and Italian. I know more French, because the local Montessori had a French teacher who taught Kindergarten, so we had French lessons every day. But even that’s rather rusty. And I took one semester of Spanish in college because I liked the teacher. (And I’m pretty sure I got an A in the class because she liked me, too. Teacher’s pet, style–get your head out of the gutter.)
My boyfriend is Latino. Does that count?
Does Pig Latin count?
Oh, onay. But I’m quite fluent in pig language myself.
*Born in and grew up in the US – yes; been reading Latin for about 35 years give or take a year or so (had it as a child, then in high school, undergrad and post-grad. Classical and medieval; my PhD dissertation was an annotated translation of a 4000 line medieval poem). I still have to read it, and occasionally lazy colleagues ask me to translate stuff for them (or to check their Latin.).
*It’s making a resurgence in high schools in the US, and was taught at my last university (in fact, I taught it for a while). It’s making a comeback in the UK; my current university doesn’t offer it except for post-grad history majors, but its revival is in the works due to two growing ancient programmes in archaeology and Classical Studies at my university
*Well-familiar with ignis
*To me it’s very weird, but then again not surprising.
I took etymology and 1 year of Latin in high school but it wouldn’t shock me if other people didn’t know it. I took four years of French but I bet I would score higher on a Latin or etymology test than a French test 30 years later.
No grammar; a fair amount of vocabulary. Took a class in bioscientific terminology to fulfill my classical languages requirement when I majored in music at Loyola Marymount. I was the only student of the class who wasn’t on a pre-med track.
But when we sang that oratorio about the tibia bone being connected to the patella bone, I was right on top of everything…
I wouldn’t say I know Latin, but I did take two years of it. (Yes, I live in the US)
It was taught in my high school. I think, only because one of the French teachers wanted to teach it. It had not been offered at my high school prior to her; I have no idea if it’s still offered.
Yes, I would have figured out what ignis meant before you told me.
I find that my background in Latin has been extremely useful in my professional capacity as an editor. It gave me a much more solid understanding of grammar and how, changing the location of a word within a sentence does not necessarily change what part of speech it is. Also, knowing root words and the meanings of prefixes and suffixes, that’s super helpful. If I come across I word I don’t know, if it’s Latin-based, I can figure it out from the parts. “Defenestration” comes to mind. De = undo, fenestra = window; defenestration = close or remove a window.
I’ve also studied French, Spanish, and Italian and because all three are based on Latin, I found each relatively easy to pick up, or at least, easier to translate because the root words are often the same or similar enough to clue me in.
That is my favorite Latin joke. 
I should note, since I probably missed the edit window already, that I took Latin at a public high school that didn’t even offer AP or IB classes.
Maybe I’m being whooshed here, but you do know that defenestration is the process of leaving a building through a window*, right?
*For maximum shock effect, it is usually presumed that the window is on an upper floor.
it is throwing something out a window, maybe not literally.
it has also gotten to mean getting rid of Windows, the operating system.
This ^^.
My Latin-based guess was pretty close and upon looking it up, johnpost pretty much quoted verbatim (oh look! Latin!) the American Heritage Dictionary definition.
There are approximately 800,000 words in the English language. Nobody knows 'em all.
I did Latin at school, in the UK – a “public school”, which there means private school. That was some half-century ago; the great majority of it forgotten, and more or less the only Latin I know now, is in standard quite-well-known tags-and-quotes.
I’ve long known that “ignis” means fire – by chance, really: the Latin for “will-o’-the-wisp” or “marsh light” being ignis fatuus – “foolish fire” – which I learned Lord-knows-where (not in class) and found pleasantly daft, so it stuck with me.
I wasn’t graded high enough at school to be taught Latin, but I have picked up some from botanical names - which has proven useful in comprehension of Spanish and Italian (as well as English, wot I already spoke). I’d have understood the igni thing.
How does a word that means “to set fire to” not have a particularly fiery meaning? It’s only the metaphorical usages that aren’t fiery.
Anyway, I don’t remember much of it, but I did have five years of Latin in high school and college (Catholic schools all). And even before that, I recognized that both “igni” and “pyro” were roots meaning “fire”, though I’d have to guess at which one was Latin and which Greek.
Oh, and the way the Romans dealt with their enemies was “ferre ignoque”, or “by iron and fire”.