In high school, Maureen Dowd confides in her New York Times column yesterday, Dowd “translated swatches of Julius Caesar’s ‘The Battle for Gaul’ from Latin to English while nibbling cheese crackers.” Now, we get to! (Dowd penned the second half of her column in Latin…ish).

Oh, you studied German in tenth grade? Slacker. Allow the blogosphere to help. Ablative Absolute tells us how MoDo’s familiar brand of snide translates. And LatinLanguage blog — “a place for Latin students, scholars, and friends” — notes that “Ms. Dowd didn’t want to guess at the Latin phrase” for “tanning bed” (which, it is suggested, might be “lectus apricandi”).