"Why on earth did you study Latin?" the stranger in question inquires, he or she perplexed (perplexus, confused) as to why I could possibly squander my student loan on a so-called "dead" language.
"On the contrary," I proffer, with arms outstretched like a Roman orator. By now, the routine is well-rehearsed. "It's actually immortal. And by the way! 'Immortal' is a Latin word!" (Immortalis, deathless).
I then inwardly cringe, as I morph into a gruesome blend of Boris Johnson and Stephen Fry - with a heavy dose of Monty Python added in for good measure.
"What did the Romans ever do for us? Mate, where do I begin?" I leap onto my soapbox. At this point, I really cannot stop myself.
"What, you mean, besides law, medicine, horticulture et cetera? Why, the list is never-ending! Literature! Culture! History!"
I morph into a gruesome blend of Boris Johnson and Stephen Fry - with a heavy dose of Monty Python added in
My name is Charlotte. I am a Latin nerd. And I truly believe that, despite society's calls to study "practical" subjects - ones that will take us straight from classroom to career with ease and earning-power - there is great merit to be gained from learning for learning's sake.
However radical in this day and age, the idea is not unfamiliar to Jewish education. Indeed, the highest form of Bible study, Torah Lishma, propounds studying the Torah for its own sake alone. Meanwhile, the community's determination to continue teaching Hebrew - despite pressure from exam boards to scrap the subject - highlights the importance of enriching our learning beyond grade boundaries.
For me, the love of Latin began young, in year eight at school, when I first met Caecilius, the Cambridge Latin Course's central protagonist and paterfamilias, father of the family. He had a wife, Metella; a slave, Clemens; a son, Quintus; a cook, Grumio, and lived in Pompeii.
Their life, we learned, was leisurely, made up of afternoons in the forum, dinner parties in the villa, and taking in the odd gladiatorial skirmish or two. We followed the family's story scene by scene - imagine Eastenders, but in togas - up until, tragically, they met their demise at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Exams came and went - GCSEs, then A-Levels - before I left for university to study, you guessed it, Latin (and Spanish; it is good to keep at least one foot in the present tense).
But while society's obsession with examining its young more fiercely than a scalpel-happy coroner led me to resent other subjects, Latin's lustre never dimmed.
And, just as an archaeologist discovers more troves the deeper down he or she digs, so too did I discover centuries of writers, artists, politicians, satirists and historians that not only influenced our modern world, but were fundamental to its evolution.
You could only delve deep if you held a special key and, for me, that key was reading Latin.
Were it not for this old, dusty subject, Shakespeare would have been nothing more than another ruff-wearing, uninspired minstrel - his subject matter, you see, came first in the tomes of Ovid.
What about birthdays? What would cake and presents mean without the Roman calendar?
Jewish historiography, meanwhile, is also indebted. Would we know as much as we do about the Pharisees and Sadducees, the destruction of the temple and the last stand of the Jews atop Masada without the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus?
In addition, let us not forget roads, central heating, sewage systems - I could go on ad infinitum, forevermore.
But more than these contributions to our modern day, my love for Latin really boils down to the fact that I loved to study it - to burrow down the hole of the past and find a treasure chest on the other side. Funnily enough, the Latin word for "treasure" is thesaurus.
Yes, it has served me well during the "bonus" question in my local pub quiz; but more than that, it sparked my curiosity. The result? I wanted to learn more, and so developed my writing, analytical and creative skills in the process.
This is what happens when you study something you love, however obscure or reputedly "dead" it may be.
My interrogator is, most likely, unconvinced, grunting that "it still seems like a waste of time to me".
But I clamber off my soap box, and onwards I march.
Cicero said it better than I ever could: "Semper idem, Always the same thing".
