Latin is useless.  You cannot Spanish your way through an emergency room with it; you cannot Mandarin your way to a business deal with it.  It is important because I have studied it, and the fact that I know it gives it its value.  nota bene, id est, pay attention to this example:

Magistra est Musa mihi.

In this sententia, I could have put the verb est last, as is traditional, but only since the final and the primal positions of the sentence carry the strongest value: the first and last positions are the most emotionally charged. Normally the verb and subject claim these positions, but the dative interloper has stolen the show.  In this brief sentence, I separate the Musa from the Magistra.  (Since this is Latin syntax, the words can go anywhere I want them to be; the force of the author’s will.)  Magistra is central to the meaning, sentiment, and the grammar of this sentence.  She is the subject.  What of Musa? 

Musa would seem to be the next most important word in this brief statement.  The predicate nominative clings to Magistra like a wet towel. But there is est, being, right in between.  Being between two names that describe one person. Est is the equals sign to balance the equation.  But what must throw off the balance, threaten the symmetry, but the self-referential Mihi.  Romans encouraged egoism. 

For the next statement I was forced to consult the dictionary.  I was comforted to find that the word I sought could only be found in the Cassell’s Latin Dictionary’s English-to-Latin section. What if all of Latin was lost for good and only this remnant text remained, this digital blip traveling around the cosmos looking for a place to land, this poor sentence?   

Next to the word reads the editorial note: eccl.  Ecclesiastical.  Not a word derivative of the old days when a man might offer sacrifice to Vesta, tended by her powerful Virgins, symbol of the strength and eternity of Rome, and then right away visit the Lupanar (I had to look that one up too: I thought that the term was Lupanaria,and I am somewhat correct.  Since this is a neuter, 3rd declension noun, Lupanaria would be the plural nominative, accusative, or vocative form—what drunk patron would address the brothel itself?), decide which sexual act he wanted performed by reading the paintings over the lintels, go into the appropriate room, enjoy the sex, and go home to see his wife and family.  This word, though, comes from a time when the whore might work for the bishop, a wife cuckhold her man, and all honor the Eucharistic moon.  I choose the word flavored by its Ecclesiatical origins, but moving in the direction of humanism and renascence, when the word conjures the sense of the driving passion, the possession that burns, the motive for writing: daemon.

Magistra est daemon mihi.