The vocabulary of wonder
An unorthodox language teacher turned Latin, Esperanto and Shakespeare into a seductive conspiracy.

BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
"Zarf." "Strigil." "Fubsy." "Duniwassal." "Surd." It's not so hard to excite 12-year-olds about language when your vocabulary list begins with such entries, whose syllables -- phonetic fireworks exploding on the margins of absurdity -- enthrall me to this day.

In Nathaniel Glidden's classroom at the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., we learned to spell, define and love such words -- one a day for the school year. As we did, we learned to think of the dictionary as a source of endless amusement and language as both a playground and a reflection of the teeming colors of human life.

Mr. Glidden's general language class was required of all incoming seventh graders (the private school was, at the time, a grade 7-12 operation). The class offered a world tour of the five languages -- Latin, Spanish, French, German and Russian -- from which students would pick their specialty in the next grade. By starting with Latin, the tongue I eventually chose, Glidden gave his students a sense of the skeletal architecture of all language: Once you've tasted the precise logic of Latin grammar, every other language feels a bit loose, laid-back -- and easily masterable.

But this wasn't, primarily or ultimately, a grammar class; it was an indoctrination into language as a benignly occult practice. Glidden, a ruddy-faced, jovially patrician man who took up teaching later in life after a career in business, knew how to make a subject attractive to adolescents by turning it into something of a secret society or friendly conspiracy. That approach extended beyond the basic general language curriculum. By 1972, when I was Glidden's student, he'd stopped offering the elective in "world peace and global disarmament" that my older brother had taken at the high tide of 1960s idealism; but he still coached a team for the model United Nations, and every one of his students had to learn at least a few weeks' worth of Esperanto, that language of global patriots.

There was nothing generic about Glidden's pedagogy -- even his disciplinary approach was playful. If he thought students in the back of the room were dozing off, he'd pull a red rubber ball out of his desk and bounce it off the back wall over our heads. And though I always resented rote study, I somehow never minded his assignments to memorize and recite passages from Shakespeare; later, writing a Shakespeare thesis in college, I realized he'd etched the supple rhythm and texture of Elizabethan verse into my cranium, almost as if I'd been playing roles in a repertory company.

In my junior year of high school -- long before I, as an adult writer, could thank him for making language something I could love -- Glidden died of cancer. But his teaching still guides my typing fingers every time I try to make a written word sing. To him, I raise my zarf.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

More teachers we loved:
+ Remembrance of things present By Carol Lloyd
+ Greek love By Hank Hyena
+ Teaching by daydream By Chris Colin
+ Radical redhead Miss Smith By Jenn Shreve
+ One valentine too late By Karen Templer
+ My Latin love affair By Andrew Leonard
+ The warlock of grammar By Fiona Morgan

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