Many of my friends delight in employing arcane, archaic and obscure language in everyday speech.

You know… the type of people that crunch through a cryptic crossword over lunch, or argue over whether or not a full stop belongs at the end of an abbreviation.

I confess that I enjoy using our language to communicate, and delight in discovering old and new grammatical oddities.

Occasionally I’ve used an abbreviation in report writing at work, where a particular incident occurs, for example, in the 2nd inst., meaning “the second day of the month”.  This is a Latin abbreviation for instante mense, meaning “this month” or “the current month”.

But a good friend asked me recently what the Latin abbreviation  was for ‘next month’, or indeed ‘last month’.

A quick Wiki-Google revealed that proximo mense may be abbreviated to prox. meaning ‘next month’, while ultimo mense may be abbreviated to ult. meaning ‘last month’.

Other Latin abbreviations can be found on Wikipedia.

Please use your new-found grammar responsibly.

No tags