At school, we didn’t learn two words from our Latin teacher – he just went on ad nauseam.

Sometimes the oldest jokes are the… well, oldest. And when it comes to Latin, it can be hard to Ovid – sorry, avoid – the putdowns.

Poor old Latin. While French and Spanish and English sneer at it from the front of the classroom, momentarily forgetting their origins, little Latin sits on his own at the back of the class. But like any diligent pupil, Latin is busy beavering away, getting on with his work in the belief that his time at the top of the class will come again.

Latin may not be the sexiest of subjects, but at least it’s something we all use every day, whether we realise it or not. Unlike, say, geography.

Try to utter a sentence without using Latin – you will find it’s pretty much impossible. More than half of English words have Latin origins, and then there are the Latin words we use in everyday English. It’s pretty difficult to avoid them too…

You don’t need to read verbatim (D’oh!) from a thesaurus (D’oh!) to realise that only an ignoramus (D’oh!) would say RIP (D’oh!) to Latin, write its obituary (D’oh!) and give it a post-mortem (D’oh!) examination, yet if you took a vox pop (D’oh!) of the human species (D’oh!) you might find the consensus (D’oh!) is that we don’t need Latin and vice versa (D’oh!), that it’s useless, pointless etc (D’oh!) etc (D’oh!).

Latin has a bad press, but behind the negative headlines there is a new generation seeking it out. Carpe diem, innit? The last two governments have fought hard to put it on the political agenda (yes, that’s another Latin word), although whether this has been to benefit pupils or placate would-be voters is a matter of debate. Nevertheless, the number of secondary schools in Britain that teach Latin has doubled in the past 15 years.

One of those teaching Latin outside the classroom is , author of Gwynne’s Latin, published this week and the follow-up to last year’s Gwynne’s Grammar.

In that book, Gwynne maintained that using good grammar can make you a happier person – in , he claims the language can change your life.

‘It’s a training for everything,’ he told Metro. ‘It trains your mind and your character so as to give you a life which is satisfying, successful and happy as no other form of training can come near to doing. You could almost call it magical. If your mind gets trained by Latin, you can actually feel it clarifying your thoughts.’

For Gwynne, the key to Latin lies in its difficulty – if you can conquer it, you can pretty much do anything.

‘In order to actually cope with Latin, you’ve got to learn to concentrate and focus on every tiny detail,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to train your memory because there’s an awful lot to learn. This can take effort, so you’ve got to learn consciousness, diligence, perseverance, all of which are so valuable, even if you’re trying to learn to play chess or golf or tiddlywinks. If you can read Virgil, there’s nothing you can’t do.’

But Gwynne says the students he teaches – often through online video – enjoy the challenge. ‘What they love doing is learning to recite the declensions and conjugations. What they like is the achievement – you don’t need to dumb it down to them.’

He is critical of the Cambridge Latin Course, the textbook used in 90 per cent of schools that teach the subject and one that has sold more than 4m copies in 40 years. Gwynne believes the book’s neglect of Latin words’ numerous endings holds pupils back.

‘You cannot learn Latin from it,’ he said. ‘You are taught to guess. It’s all dumbed down. They don’t teach you to translate English into Latin. It is completely crackpot.’

But Will Griffiths, director of the , maintains the textbook has the right approach.

‘Latin used to be taught by telling students a lot of endings. That worked for some kids, but across the board it’s a highly inefficient way of teaching people to read Latin,’ he said.

‘There’s not a lot of point in learning all the endings of the nouns and the verbs if you’re not then going to do anything with them. We took the view that the aim of learning Latin was to learn to understand and appreciate Latin literature – because you’re never going to speak to anybody in Latin, you’re not going to meet any Romans in the street. The bottom line is if it wasn’t working, teachers wouldn’t use it.’

Latin is currently taught in just under 1,200 British secondary schools – about 12,000 pupils take the subject at GCSE and 1,500 at A-level. While education secretary Michael Gove has talked publicly of the need to entice more pupils into taking Latin, Griffiths thinks the numbers could grow if the government dispensed with the spin.

‘Latin is a little bit politicised as a subject area and it has particular baggage that comes with it,’ he said. ‘Sometimes people want to associate themselves with Latin because they think the public views Latin as being academic and rigorous.

‘This government has its heart in the right place but it’s probably done more damage to Latin in secondary schools than the government before it.’

Griffiths said the numbers taking Latin would grow even more if the subject was made easier – something that politicians are unlikely to advocate in an era when the public mistakenly believes that young people effortlessly conjure A and A star grades out of thin air.

‘If people had a bit more guts to come out and say that this subject is too hard for most kids, I don’t see any reason at all why Latin GCSE should not be just as accessible as history, French and maths,’ he said.

Mary Beard, , said Latin is important because it is the ‘bedrock of western culture’. She started learning it when she was 11.

‘It opened up all kinds of new ways of thinking about language, which I found fascinating, and the excitement of being able to read things that were written 2,000 years ago was very special,’ she said.

‘Virgil’s Aeneid is a good example here. I would be prepared to bet that every single day for the last 2,000 years someone somewhere has been reading that poem.’

Prof Beard described the government’s approach to Latin as inconsistent and pointed out the current public fascination with Roman culture, as illustrated by the success of the Pompeii exhibition at the British Museum in London. Latin is all around us, she said.

‘An awful lot of clocks have Roman numerals and films are dated in Latin. Every time we go to a place ending in “chester”, we’re going to a place that was once a Roman military base, or “castra”.’ And her favourite Latin word? ‘Crapula’, meaning ‘hangover’.

But even Latin lovers see a benefit in its relative silence.

‘One of the great advantages of Latin is that you don’t have to speak it,’ said Prof Beard. ‘You don’t have to learn how to ask for a pizza in it.’