Opinion: Obama and Cicero -- Veni, Vidi, Vici and Then Some

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In his speech in Grant Park in Chicago last night, Barack Obama reminded listeners around the world that ‘’while we breathe, we hope.’’

It’s an old line, rendered in centuries past in Latin as ‘’dum spiro spero,’’ because it probably came from that grand ol’ phrasemaker, Cicero.

Since then it’s been embraced by the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots, by the Scottish town of St. Andrews, the sacred seat of All Things Golf, even before the phrase became the secret mantra of every golfer -- and by the state of South Carolina, which adopted it in 1776, not, as some people might suspect, in 1861.