Grammar Girl here. As we roll into the depths of winter, I hope you enjoy this great show. The Grammar Pellusians who support the podcast got back in July as a bonus episode.

Greetings, Grammar Pallusians. I am here with Martha Barnett, a host of a Way with Words podcast and radio show, and more importantly, author of the new book, Friends with Words, Adventures in Language Land. We just finished the main episode, which you'll find in your feeds. We talked about Greek gods, riddalen, dubious formication. It was amazing. And,

you know, we're here to continue the discussion. Martha, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thanks so much, Mignon. Delighted to have you here. In the book, you describe how your love of Greek

started you down the path of being a word lover, a worder like a birder

when you were in college. And I think people would just love the story of the professor

who tutored you for all those years. Oh, I'm so happy to be able to share this one because it

really means a lot to me. I like to think of this story as my favorite failure because I was so embarrassed with

the problem I had at the time, but it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me or one of the

best things that ever happened to me. When I was in college, I had studied Latin in high school,

but I thought, well, let's learn ancient Greek. That would be so cool

to be able to read Homer in the original or Plato in the original. So I started taking ancient

Greek and it was so much harder than Latin, you know, different letters, different markings.

And I really struggled with it so much so that I could see I was going to

flunk the class if I didn't drop it. So I actually dropped the class and I felt so, you know,

embarrassed that I thought, well, I'll go home to Kentucky this summer and try to find some

starving graduate student who can teach me ancient Greek. And I didn't find that

person, but I did find an elderly professor of classics, retired professor of classics.

He was an immigrant from Latvia, and he was a polyglot who spoke at least a dozen languages

very easily. Wow. And Professor Leonard Litkovsky agreed to teach me Greek. And he

taught me Greek on Monday nights. I think on Tuesdays he taught Spanish or Italian on Wednesday.

You know, it went on like that. He just, he was a born teacher and he just couldn't help himself.

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