One of my freelance clients is a scientist-turned-writer who is crafting two very different manuscripts, one based on the fascinating story of his father, an immigrant to this country who lived a remarkably rich life, and the other a young-adult work about development encroaching on wildlife habitats. Both works, even in draft state, are very good.

In the section I was reading today, he used a word I have not seen in a long time: usufruct. (Say “youse-zoo-frucht”) It usually crops up in legal writings, meaning the use of property not one’s own, carried out in a way that doesn’t harm or devalue it.

There is nothing like going off to hunt down the origin of a word in order to avoid work, household tasks, exercise, bill paying. So, of course I did just that.

The word derives from the Latin usus et fructus meaning “use and enjoyment.”

I took Latin about 100 years ago. Despite my mediocre grades then and dodgy memory now, it still helps me figure out and retain the meaning of words. At the time the only thing I liked about the class was that every vocabulary word seemed to have a story, a bit of history, behind it.

It was a further bonus that no one was really sure how Latin was pronounced, so it did not have the tonal challenges of Spanish or French. We read it aloud as if speaking weirdly spelled English, which suited me just fine. (I once scored so low on a Romance-language ability test that I was asked to re-take it; the test graders assumed I’d had a damaged audio tape.)

For all its stolid structure, there is something warm and quite subtle about Latin. The fact that this phrase has been co-opted to describe the dull concept of what is essentially right-of-way to a neighboring property is beside the point.

When the Romans said usus et fructus, however they pronounced the words, there surely was a lilt to their voices. They were enjoying the moment, and no one else was the worse for it.