An epigraph.
Dunno about that. The latin names for things in the natural world are far less often unambiguous.
‘Bluejay’ happens to be reasonably unambiguous too - so you have a point, however, had you said Robin - you could have been talking about one or the other of two quite different birds.
I’m not saying it’s ‘smart’, but it is quite often useful.
I r speak lolcats, I know it from my learnings and having seen many lolcats in my day.
Me? I would learn french, that way I would be able to understand the genius that is “Matrix reloaded”
What’s interesting is that I’ve read a few Adventure Stories from the late 19th and Early 20th centuries where our Intrepid Explorers discover some ancient monument or Important Find with an inscription in Latin- and there’s no translation provided, the author having assumed (not entirely unreasonably) that if you can read the story, you went to school. And if you went to school, you learned Latin. Therefore, you know what the inscription the Intrepid Explorers found would translate to in English and no “in-text” translation was necessary. :smack:
Vah! Denuone latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. *
*Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out. (according to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A218882)
And it has become fashionable to say mea cupla where normal people would just say “sorry about that, chief”. It lies at the elitist end of the apology spectrum:
mea culpa <----------------- I'm sorry -----------------> my bad
(pretentious) (normal) (monosyllabic-limited)
100 years ago, I might have agreed with you. My grandmother was a Latin teacher, my grandfather, a history teacher. They had frequent dinner table arguments about how “dead” Latin was, or so I was told.
50 years ago, I might have agreed with you. My mother and I argued over the dinner table whether I should take Latin or French. French won.
Now, I dunno. Is it still a good idea to learn such an obsolete and unspoken language unless you are planning on entering the medical profession? If so, will that always be the case? Forever?
Aren’t there better and more practical uses for your limited classtime? Like, maybe, basket weaving?
As long as 2000 years of human art and thought was expressed primarily through the means of written Latin, it’s worth having access to that in the original. It’s a significant enough chunk of history to be worth accessing.
Alas, many of my students cannot read Victorian English, much less contemporary college-level English writing, so I suppose we’ll have to jettison it in favor of twittering Lolcatz. I’m sure we’re all the richer for it.
If you want to be just that wee bit extra pretentious (and who doesn’t?), I recommend Je suis très désolé (“I am very sorry”). Covers a variety of situations and sounds apologetic even if the other party ne parle pas Français 
That’s really sad- Victorian English is very colourful and conveys a great many subtleties and nuances that modern, informal English cannot manage so… elegantly, IMHO.
Volare! Oh, oh!
But that could be taken for an all-out, full-on, no-holds-barred apology. I need to know the Latin for “I’m sorry if anybody took offense”.
I am SO gonna use that.
Or however you say the above in Latin.
Timeo danaos et dona ferentes.
OK what the hell is an “all-out, full-on, no-holds-barred apology” and how is it different from an apology? Are there degrees of apology now? If so, how about:
First degree apology: I’m sorry.
Second degree apology: I’m so sorry.
Third degree apology: I’m very sorry.
Jimmy Swaggart apology: Dear god I’m sorry.
There. No dead languages required.
There are indeed degrees of apology, ranging from “I’m not actually sorry but you’re easily offended so it’s really easier to pretend I am sorry than get into an argument about it” to “I have made an error/mistake and I apologise for it and any inconvenience caused” to “I fucked up spectacularly, I regret it, and will do everything I can to sort it out”.
Oh, shit, yeah. (Rendered, I believe, in Sebastiane as “Oh, excrementum!”) Latin is for pansies–it’s Sanskrit you want for that deep-down Indo-European erudition.
Semper ubi sub ubi. This is the only Latin you need to know. Unless you’re really into free-balling. Or whatever the ladies call it.
Sic transit gloria mundi…(you don’t need to know this)
Ubi o ubi est mea sub-ubi?
I promise you I am not keeping them in a special drawer in my house.
Really.
Honest!