So let's say it's 1650, and you're trying to get into the Royal Academy to present your results on fluxions or whatevs, but you don't know the secret handshake and your endless loquations are getting you nowhere with the surly bouncers. This is because you keep haranguing them in your commoner tongue, whereas the learned (pronounced learn-ed) assembled inside speak the ancient Roman language of the gods. But I don't know Latin! you protest, with much hand waving, only to be met with the steel-eyed gaze and icy silence of men contemptuous by training and mysterious by nature. Then, at long last, one of the bouncers breaks rank, takes a step toward you, and stamping his knocker into the plague-ridden dust of the streets of London oh-so-precariously close to your poorly-shodden feet, he barks: "Either learn or leave, then, young master. Either learn or leave." You slink back to your hovel, your only comfort is the knowing that in a hundred years Washington will stomp these red-coated bastards at Yorktown. But for now you sit, steaming over your cold plate of porridge, thinking only to your pre-dawn rising for yet another day at the cruel apothecary where you ply your trade under uncaring taskmasters, the unseen results on fluxions or whatevs that would have brought you escape from their servitude stacked neatly beside your mead mug, the tuberculosis taking command of your withering alveoli. If only you had been wearing your LabKitty Aut Disce Aut Disce shirt, how your life might had been different. How your life might had been different.