But they seem reluctant to depart, remaining as ghostly presences of a language that has otherwise died out. Perhaps these phrases remain in use because no more elegant English alternatives have emerged or maybe they have now become so much part of English that people no longer think of them as being Latin. We talk about doing something ‘ ad nauseam’ (to the point of sickness), having an ‘ alter ego’ (other self), feeling ‘ compos mentis’ (sound of mind), or being a ‘ persona non grata’ (person who is not welcome). As a result, many of its phrases have survived intact in modern English. Latin was once regarded as a language of high status and was widely used in preference to English in such official circles as the universities, the law, and the church.
After the preposition ‘pro’, the ablative form of the word (‘quo’) is required rather than the nominative form (‘quid’). A Quid Pro Quo in finance is a phrase that conveys an act of exchange. In fact, ‘quid’ and ‘quo’ are both forms of the same Latin word, but Latin is an inflected language, meaning that the endings of words tend to change according to the grammatical role. (kwd prou kwou) Word forms: plural quid pro quos or for 2 quids pro quo. The idea is that person A does something (the ‘quid’) to help person B on the understanding that person B will do something in return (the ‘quo’) to help person A. The literal meaning of the phrase ‘quid pro quo’ is ‘something for something’. One particular Latin phrase has been front and centre in the news recently as the impeachment enquiry into the activities of President Trump tries to assess whether he instigated a ‘ quid pro quo’ by making American aid to the Ukraine conditional on the Ukraine investigating one of his political rivals. Displaying slides of Trump, Zelensky, and a map of Ukraine, Elizabeth Coppock, a CAS associate professor of. This is in a political realm where politicians make these judgments, Seipp says, and not courts and judges. Latin is a famously dead language, but it was busy enough while it was alive that echoes of it can still be heard in the modern world. So a roomful of politicians may get their turn to debate the meaning of that 700-year-old phrase quid pro quo.
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