Hi! Welcome to “Dusty Phrases.” You will find below an ancient phrase in one language or another, along with its English translation. You may also find the power to inspire your friends or provoke dread among your enemies.
For other examples, visit HERE:
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Latin:
Bonum certamen certare
English:
Fight the good fight
This is Latin translation of the New Testament. It comes from 1 Timothy 6:12:
“Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.”
If you grew up in Church, you might be familiar with the English translation of the Latin, due to it being the title of a well-known hymn:
A search of the Latin translation also led me to learn about an association between the phrase and the Knights Templar. Please click the link to learnlatin.substack.com to learn about how the phrase was used as a greeting and then begin incorporating the Latin greeting into your daily lives in like manner. That substack site is awesome, by the way, and I’m really happy to see someone doing a better and more thorough job of what I’ve been doing here for a while.
I confess that one of my ambitions is to see the Latin language reintroduced as a mandatory element of a standard Western education (which it was until the 20th century.) First, knowing Latin as a base language would make Romance language learning a lot easier. Second, knowing Latin would improve the study of history, law, and science – a lot of which was written originally in Latin. Third, it would be broadly unifying for the cultural descendants of the Romans to know a common and inherited language.
As to the last point, you could continue to celebrate national differences while maintaining recognition that those different nations descend from the same tree. Knowing their language would also cause a sense of unity with your ancestors – which is a strong counter-measure against certain forces at work in the world who aim to untether people from their ancestors or to denigrate those ancestors with a broad brush. Self-hatred and the total abandonment of tradition does not produce healthy societies.
Bonum certamen certare!
