Mensa, Mensa, Mensam… and Other Memories of Learning Latin

'In wine there is truth, in water there is health'Back in the day - 1979, when I was a 15 year old schoolboy, Year 10 came along (we called it 4th form back then) and we had to choose our options for O’ Levels - an academic rite of passage for UK kids. These would, a few years after I did them, be renamed GCSEs in yet another governmental attempt to reinvent the wheel – standing for General Certificate in Secondary Education. If you’re not from the UK, these are the main qualifications kids do when they hit 16 (sometimes before, but usually at that age). The “O” in O’ Level stood for “Ordinary”, so I suppose the name change made the process of gaining the qualifications (a Herculean task, which it remains to this day) seem rather more dignified than merely scraping through something “ordinary”. Without irony, the next Level, which was and is still called A’ Level stood and stands for “advanced” so you can see the logic in changing the name, at least. Image Still with me? Now when it…