More personal canon

[jessie_menken]

A few more bits about Sara Sidle.

(Definitely not mine. Still borrowing someone else's creations.)

i. Latin is a language as dead as dead can be

Sara studied Latin in high school. It helped with SAT vocab, and she knew that having AP Latin on her transcript would impress college admissions officers. Latin was all about rules and memorization, and

Comments

[and_affection]

Posting bits of personal canon is a really great way to showcase those details that can sometimes get lost in fic, and it's neat to see how different people view a character's past. I can easily see Sara not wanting to write those stupid unimaginative English assignments. It's nice to show some possible interests outside of science, too - another thing that rarely happens with Sara.

[jessie_menken]

I was thinking that the only character who definitely speaks a foreign language, according to canon, is Nick. But between high school and college gen. ed requirements, not to mention family background (Greg and his Norwegian proverbs, for example) the other characters can't possibly all be monolingual.

Sara studying Latin in high school seemed to fit perfectly with her Type-A personality. I couldn't see her continuing with it in college, though, and she still would have had a requirement to fulfill. I was looking at the Harvard language department websites, and I saw the German prize. I knew that would have been the deciding factor for Sara. (More money than she'd make at a work-study job in an entire semester, just for a good grade? Talk about a no-brainer.)

I'm still trying to figure out the other characters. I'm pretty sure Greg studied Japanese, but the others aren't very forthcoming.

[and_affection]

Greg studied Japanese? Huh, the more I think about it, yeah, I can see that. Gil knows at least one phrase of Korean ("Time Of Your Death"), but my guess would be that he speaks bits and pieces of quite a few languages, and maybe a couple of them fluently. We know he grew up Catholic, and he would have been 6-9 years old at the time of Vatican II, so he may have picked up some Latin as a child, and more through his study of biology. He strikes me as a good bet for a Classical scholar, so I can see him maybe knowing a bit of Ancient Greek, but then again, he'd also be likely to go for languages that people actually use today. As I said, I see him doing more or less what I do - taking intro courses in a whole bunch of different languages, but not necessarily going any further with them.

Ahem. I'm hijacking your personal canon with my own, sorry.

[jessie_menken]

Oh, don't worry about it. I was thinking along similar lines, actually, and it's always nice to meet another language geek.

Grissom does seem to have quite a few bits and pieces (Korean and Spanish, definitely) and he's a definite possibility for a Classical scholar. Though I could also see him studying Chinese.

Greg is fascinated by the sheer wackiness of modern Japanese culture. (Nick once went to get the DNA results from a pair of women's underwear, and heard more about used-panty vending machines than he ever wanted to know.) He loves Japanese snack foods, strawberry Pocky in particular.