RINGING IN LATIN

Yesterday in class when I asked a Latin 2 student what I had in my hand, he said, "Chalkus," instead of the real Latin word crēta, but he was following an old trick of creating a Latin-sounding word by adding the ending -us to an existing English word.

On my drive to school this morning, I heard a radio ad for a new product called Quietus, which provides relief for sufferers of tinnitus. Unlike chalkus, in Latin quiētus, a, um is a real word, a first and second declension adjective meaning quiet, at rest, and in Latin tinnitus, ūs m. is a fourth declension noun meaning ringing. When I checked the origin of tinnitus, I found that it is from the verb tinniō (4) whose origin is given in the Oxford Latin Dictionary as onomatopoeic, i.e., imitating the sound of ringing. So chalk another one up for Latin in advertising!