Vinegar

It puzzled me slightly that we learned the Latin for vinegar - acetum. Even the alternative - sour wine - sounded slightly too obscure to be worth knowing. Somehow I had picked up without being aware of it that Latin was a language of formality, where slang had little place. (Even our Latin teacher became pained when he heard himself using the expression “Shut up...if that’s the sort of language you understand!”) We might know how, in Latin, to praise the table, love the woman or fight the soldier. But not to chat with the newsagent, to engage in banter with the bus driver or to ask for salt and vinegar on our chips.