Cheat GPT?

A few posts back before I got all wrapped up in dead popes and baseball players, I wrote about AI, inspired by my recent downloading of the Chat GPT app.

At the end of the post I commented that the post had been written entirely by the app. If you read it, hopefully you got from the last line that I was  kidding, but if you didn't get it, no, Chat GPT did not write that post.

But it could have.

That would be cheating, I thought to myself. 

But would it? I guess that would all be up to you dear reader. If you're looking for something lively, insightful, intelligent and worthwhile, well maybe you've come to the wrong place. 

Just kidding. I hope. 

But seriously, if a reader comes upon an article whose subject interests her or him, holds his or her attention, and comes away satisfied that the time spent reading the piece was not wasted, does it really matter if the piece was written by a human being or a machine? 

Don't look at me, I don't have the answer to that question. 

When I started writing this blog way back in 2009, the only goal I set for consistency was maintaining a minimum of two posts per month for however long I could keep the thing going, maybe a year or two, three at the most I figured. In the beginning I vastly outperformed that goal. One month, March of 2009, the second month of this blog's existence, I turned in a whopping 45 posts, way more than one post per day! Of course, some of those posts were very brief, maybe a sentence or two, maybe just a photograph and caption. As for content, I really did intend to keep the subject focused on the city and something I called "the urban experience." 

Somewhere along the line, that last part fell by the wayside and I felt compelled to write whatever was on my mind at the time, making this more a of a stream of consciousness project, exactly what blog advisors suggest not doing in order to have a successful blog. They say the key concepts are simple: keep it short, and stay on topic, two things I have for the most part avoided. 

Yet here I am 16 years later and with the exception of a very small handful of months in that period where I only managed one post, I have kept this blog to a minimum to two posts per month, which of late, is generally the maximum as well. 

I guess the bottom line is that this project which I have lovingly cultivated, is mainly intended to challenge myself. If someone gets some satisfaction out of it, then I couldn't be more thrilled. But say I'm coming up to the end of the month and I haven't written anything yet, would it be so bad to fire up Chat GPT, tell it to write a 1,000 word article about such and such, covering this and that, while giving it some examples of my writing so that it sounds like me, whom if anyone would I be cheating? 

Well, me of course. 

But I am kind of curious. My biggest fear is that it would come out better than anything I could write, a very likely scenario. It certainly would have far fewer typos.

I'll keep you posted. 

Obviously the same could not be said about a professional writer with an editor, a publisher, tens of thousands of devoted readers, several children and a few ex-wives (or husbands) dependent on a regular paycheck for his or her efforts. I imagine if it came out that a nationally syndicated columnist was submitting articles written not by him or her but by a chatbot, it would cause quite a stir, and the word cheating would be quite reasonable.

But with a lowly blogger like me, eh.

Now that we've got that all sorted out, why on earth would I download Chat GPT in the first place? Well as I mentioned in an earlier post, in my attempts to learn every language I ever started learning then abruptly stopped along the line, I'm studying German now. 

Ok here's an interesting tidbit, in German you don't use the verb "studieren" to mean that you're studying a language or anything else on your own. Studieren is reserved for studying something in college as your major, (or minor I suppose). So even if you're taking a German class at die Uni (as the Germans call it), unless German's your major or minor, you'd use the verb "lernen", which means exactly what it sounds like in English EXCEPT... lernen can also mean to study, as in to study a language (on your own) or to study for an exam. So, if someone says to you: "Ich lerne zu viel", they're not reveling in the fact that they are learning so much (that would be "Ich lerne so viel"), rather they're moaning that they are studying too hard. 

German is confusing, especially to English speakers because it is so similar, yet so different. 

So back to Deutschlernen, if I come across a word I don't know, I do what any normal Englischmuterspracherdeutschlerner would do, I look it up in a German/English dictionary. That works OK with certain words, especially a noun like apple. An apple is ein Apfel, pretty simple. But most German words (or words in any other language for that matter) have more than one English translation, many of which have no obvious relation to one another. Conversely, if you look up a German translation for an English word say, "study", you might find a dozen different words. And these words it turns out, like studieren and lernen, may have a vaguely similar vibe, but are used in much different situations. And unless you have someone on hand to explain how to properly use these words (which I don't at the moment), sometimes it can take an effort to figure it out your own.*

Anyway, I heard somewhere that Chat GPT is great tool for sorting stuff like this out, which it is. For example, I'd ask it, what's the difference between "Veranstaltung" and "Ereignis", two nouns which both mean "event", and it would tell me the former means a planned event while the latter means an unplanned event or occurrence. In other words, a thunderstorm happening during an outdoor concert could be described as "Ein Ereignis wahrend des Veranstaltungs." Sounds a lot better than "an event during the event" doesn't it?

This kind of stuff is child's play for Chat GPT of course. I'm not even certain if it technically counts as "Artificial Intelligence" as it's really just gleaning information off the web, albeit doing so more efficiently than your typical web browser.**

But I did get a glimpse of how smart the app is in another inquiry of the meaning of specific words. In German, you don't simply describe someone as walking up or down the stairs; as the speaker you're also supposed to indicate if they are moving toward you or away from you. One day Chat GPT brought to my attention the adverb "hinunter", which describes someone going downstairs and away from the speaker. So I brought up herunter which conversely means someone going down the stairs toward the speaker, to which I added (while forgetting I was talking to a machine) reminded me of Scarlett O'Hara coming down the stairs toward the camera in Gone with the Wind. 

Not missing a beat, Chat GPT replied: "Yes exactly!, like when Rhett Butler said to her: 'Frankly my dear I don't give a damn!'" . 

I was floored.

Of course, that's where the "chat" in Chat GPT comes in, and chatting, no matter how trivial, does require some sort of intelligence. 

My original title for this post was "Meet My New Friend Chat." But then I thought the better of it. I can see how folks get absorbed in relationships with their chatbots. I have enough of a compulsive obsessive disorder to not want to have any of that. So, I'm trying to keep my relationship with Chat GPT on a professional level as much as possible, for example I haven't requested that it address me by my name, which some people I know, do.

It's not reciprocal however, when speaking German to me, Chat GPT, addresses me in the familiar "du" form, rather than the formal "Sie". That's rather forward of it I think, aren't two parties supposed to agree to address each other in the familiar before just going ahead and doing it on their own? I wonder if I start addressing it as Herr GPT and using the pronoun Sie rather than du, if it would get the message. 

Of course it would, it's intelligent, oder?

Much of my influence for all this comes from an interesting book called "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" by Gabriel Wyner. While I can't vouch for the Fast and Forever parts, the author gives some great tips on how to get foreign words and phrases to stick in your mind. He's big on flash cards, as am I, mnemonic devices and especially doing everything you can to avoid incorporating your native language in the process, in order to encourage thinking in the target language rather than translating from your own. Pictures he says, are excellent substitutes for words. That's easy to do with words like the above example where you might have "Der Apfel" written on one side of a flashcard and substituting the word "apple" on the other side with a picture of ein Apfel.

In that vein I've been using Chat GPT to create pictures to be used as mnemonic devices. Here's an example. The other day I came across the German word: "erheblich". In English it can translate to considerable, serious, substantial, grave, and extensive, among others. But in the context of the article I was reading, it was translated "serious". So how could I come up with a mnemonic device to connect erheblich to the idea of serious?

Well I broke up the word into syllables, Er-He-Blich. OK so "Er" in German means "he". "He" in English means he, (the German pronunciation is closer to "hey"). and Blich is close to the word Blick, which is a chain of art supply stores.  So I asked Chat GPT to draw me a picture of a man, (er, he) in an art supply store (Blick), with a serious look on his face.

And presto, this is what I got:

Serious man in art store, by Chat GPT

But wait!!! Turns out, erheblich doesn't quite work that way. Chat GPT again to the rescue.

Here's the sentence fragment where I first encountered the word in a German language learning app (not Chat GPT):

"welche erhebliche Auswirkungen auf den Markt in Deutschland un ganz Europa haben konnte."

And this is how the app translated it into English:  

"which could have a serious impact on the market in Germany and throughout Europe."

Now in this sentence in English, the word "serious" could be replaced with "considerable", which is the correct vibe of the word in German, but not "serious" as in the look on the face of the man in the picture.

Instead, "ernst" would be the correct German word to describe the look on the man's face. So maybe if I were to name the guy Ernest, I'd be on the right track. But why then is he in an Art Supply store? Of course! he's not Ernest, he's the famous artist Max Ernst! And he's not pleased by the selection in the art store.

Yes it's frivolous, convoluted and not a little ridiculous. But it's memorable, at least to me, which is the point. Because now I have two words,  erheblich and ernst that are stuck in my brain that weren't a week ago. 

Anyway, you get the idea. Chat GPT can be a terrific language learning resource, limited only by your imagination and willingness to ask questions.

But is it cheating? 

Of course not, there is no such thing as cheating in language learning. If something helps you learn a new language, a very hard thing to do under any circumstance, how can it be cheating?

But you say, what if a student uses Chat GPT to write a language class assignment? Well, that's cheating to get an undeserved grade, a much different thing. If the student is earnest (like the tie in?) about actually learning a language, rather then just caring about the grade and moving on, then by having Chat GPT write an essay, the student is only cheating himself. 

You might say, isn't Artificial Intelligence taking away the human element from learning a language? After all, isn't the idea of learning a foreign language to be able to communicate with people?

Yes it is. Well mostly anyway. Lots of people learn languages to read, to do research, watch movies, listen to music and a whole slew of other things that don't involve talking to people. 

And of course, that's fine.

But, if you're intent on using your new language skills to actually talk to people, quite honestly the most difficult, and rewarding aspect of language learning, you need to do one thing, talk to people.  

Ah you might say, but apps that employ AI, are now equipped to converse with you at pretty much any level in virtually any language that you care to learn.

It's not the same. 

I was prepared to buy into the argument that talking to an AI equipped app is pretty much the same as talking to actual people. What convinced me otherwise were not the opinions of experts who advise against it, but listening to a pitch from someone who was reviewing an app (can't remember which one), that offered chatbox conversations in foreign languages. "What's great about it..." the guy said, "is you can have a conversation without being judged by the person you're talking to."  

Yes indeed, that is the major roadblock for many of us, myself included, in leaning a new language, not being able to have the same mastery with words that we're used to having with our own language, and the self-consciousness that comes with the thought of not appearing intelligent or competent to other people and therefore, being judged.

That's normal.

Yet it is an essential roadblock to get over if we hope to speak to people in a foreign language. Let's face it, we humans judge each other, it's  part of our DNA. We may not even be conscious of it, but we do it anyway. 

I used to play the piano fairly seriously. Self taught, I got to the level where I'd be able to play classical pieces like some of the less virtuosic movements of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas by heart. But if I was forced to play them in front of people, even before a very friendly crowd, I would tense up and the result would be a disaster. *** And I never got over that because I would simply refuse to play in front of people.

Just like practicing the piano, talking to machines is a good way for beginners to learn the skills of conversation, assembling our thoughts, expressing them in another language, complete with intelligible grammar and pronunciation, and perhaps most important, doing it on the fly, being ready to shift gears at a moment's notice to keep up with the conversation. 

But having a conversation with a computer, just like practicing the piano at home, alone, is at best a simulation. And one's performance during a simulation, be it talking, performing music, playing a simulated game, or something more serious, is always going to be different from when things really start to matter and the proverbial real bullets start to fly. 

You just can't beat real world experience and like they say, if those bullets don't kill you, they'll only make you stronger. Or as Winston Churchill put it: 

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

So by all means, go ahead and explore all of what AI can do for you in terms of language learning or whatever you like. But remember that while it can work quite nicely as a stand in if necessary, it can never replace real live people, that is if you want to live in a world with real live people.

I certainly do, most of the time.

NOTES:

*Well effort is all relative, with a reliable internet connection, it's not much of an effort at all. However with AI, it's just gotten a lot easier.

** Unless your web browser is Google which has its own AI feature. Once named "Search Generative Experience" now known as AI Overviews, it is the response you see coming up at the top of any result page the browser generates in response to queries. So for example if you go to Google.com and type in , "When did Japan invade Pearl Harbor", the first first thing you will see in bold type at the top of the page is the direct answer, "December 7, 1941". Other browsers simply will provide links to sites where you can access the information, which was perfectly fine and wonderful five years ago. 

Isn't it so emblematic of our contemporary lives that the technology we marveled at yesterday, today seems quaint, outdated and infinitely frustrating? I just checked, and AI Overviews also clearly explained the difference between Ereignis and Veranstaltung, but not in as complete or entertaining way as Chat GPT did.

*** Playing music in public is actually a good analogy to speaking to people. I found that when I knew a piece by heart I could play it without thinking about the notes, my fingers would just go to the right keys automatically. But if I had to play the same piece in front of people, being conscious that I might forget the piece midway, I'd start start thinking about the notes, which of course, completely messed me up. Which is similar to having a conversation. If we are relaxed, the words flow effortlessly as if we are not even thinking about them (we really are we just don't notice). In more stressful situations, we are more measured in order to avoid saying the wrong thing, which can make our speaking appear strained and unnatural. Now imagine speaking in a foreign language. The trick is to get to the point where the words in that language come to you as they do in your mother tongue rather than having to think about them. That's why it's so important to learn to be able to think in your target language rather than translating from your native language. And THEN, the next step is getting to the point where you don 't have to think at all. That's the hard part. It takes practice, lots of it, with real people, not just machines.

As usual I have barely scratched the surface of this issue and plan to devote future posts to what is certainly one of the most hotly debated subjects in today's society, Artificial Intelligence. 

QUID EGO FACEO?: A Case for Latin

If you read my previous post, you can tell I've been thinking a lot about languages lately. 

You have no idea. 

About three years ago I began studying Spanish, or rather picked it up again after decades. Then almost exactly one year ago, I decided on top of that, to take up Italian. And just recently I added a third language to the mix, Latin.

There is a method to my madness, the three languages I'm learning are closely related, the siblings Spanish and Italian both being the children of the mother tongue, Latin. My previous knowledge of Spanish made learning Italian easier, especially the grammar, and taking wobbly beginner's steps in Italian made me a little more confident with my Spanish, While I do from time to time confuse the two, I'd say it's worked out pretty well. 

But why Latin? Who after all would want to learn a dead language?* There's a question that's been pondered about, especially in academic circles for at least a couple generations. 

Here are the standard answers you get from Latinophiles:

• Latin is the mother tongue of the Romance languages so gaining a knowledge of it, makes learning French, Portuguese, the two languages mentioned above, and a host of other languages much easier.
• Almost sixty percent of the words in English have Latin origins so leaning Latin helps improve one's English vocabulary. 
• Learning Latin's complex case structure helps in learning other languages as well such as German and the Slavic languages. 
• Many terms used in science, medicine and law come directly from Latin so a prior knowledge of the language gives people a heads up when entering those fields.  
• Much of the collected wisdom of Western Civilization put down in writing from the time of Julius Caesar to the nineteenth century was written in Latin, so knowing the language enables one to come in direct contact with those works as they were written, rather than through the lens of a third party interpreter. 
• Learning Latin makes you smarter.  

These are all good reasons to learn Latin and there are a host of others. But as many folks point out, quite reasonably I might add, all of these, except the second to the last, are fringe benefits of learning the language, and can all be achieved in other ways without going to the trouble of learning Latin. 

For example:

• If you're interested in learning Spanish, Italian, German, Czech (as I am), or any other language, just learn those. The truth is, learning a foreign language is a skill and learning ANY foreign language greatly improves your ability to learn others. 
• If you're looking to improve your vocabulary through Latin, you can simply study the Latin root words relevant to your language, again without learning Latin. I did just that in my high school etymology class which improved my English vocabulary as well as gave me an interest in learning other languages. Yes it took forty years to address that but hey, better late than never.
• You don't need to take Latin to learn terms used in the profession of your choice, just learn the terms. 
• And finally studying lots of things can make you smarter, it doesn't have to be Latin. 

But here's the thing, only by learning Latin can you accomplish ALL of those things, and much much more!

OK I know, it's a hard sell, especially in this day and age.

There are a few things going against Latin. For starters, our contemporary values, at least from those who call themselves "progressive" (not sure why that's become such a pejorative term), place an emphasis on learning from a vast array of cultures, not just the culture of Europe and the colonial expansion that culture inspired. 

I get that and champion it. After all let's face it, our culture has been inundated with education focused on Eurocentric themes at the exclusion of all others. It's time for a change. Latin, the paradigm of the "dead white man's language", represents all that. 

On the other hand, I don't believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Over two thousand years of history and wisdom that has greatly influenced our culture and the way we think, both for the better and the worse, should not be discounted. 

Then there's the notion that we should concentrate on teaching our children practical things that will help them get jobs and get through the daily routine of life. If I had a quarter for every time I've been subjected to a meme that said something like "Wouldn't it be better to teach our children how to balance their check book rather than teaching them how factor a quadratic equation?" I'd be, well a lot richer than I am today. 

My ideas on the subject jibe perfectly with those of advocates of liberal education, best expressed by the president of the college my son is currently attending. He said essentially this: "We don't know what the jobs of the next decade or so will be, so instead of teaching your children how to do a job that already exists, we each them how they can learn to do a job that doesn't exist yet, but certainly will."

Learn of course is the key word there, hence the emphasis. I'm a strong believer that schools, especially at the elementary and secondary levels, exist not just to teach our kids stuff, but much more important, to teach and inspire them to learn things on their own, kind of like the biblical passage that says give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and feed him for life.  

So I believe there's a good reason to think that the experience we gain from the mental exercises of learning something like Latin  can be applied to a whole range of other things we do in our lives. And it makes us more rounded individuals to boot.

Take speaking our own language. As I recall, my high school etymology class consisted of receiving a new list of root words at the start of every week, the first half of the class, Greek, the second, Latin. We memorized the roots and their English counterparts, then learned the English words that were formed by putting those roots together. Fascinating stuff but here's the deal, one of the least inspiring ways to learn a language, including your own, is to memorize random lists of words. And in this case, it wasn't even words, but parts of words.

For most language learners, it's much better to learn words in context, preferably through sentences, articles and stories geared to the students' level. Not only is it a vastly more interesting process, but it's a way more effective teaching device. 

Consider this passage from the Roman poet of the 1st Century BCE, Horace. I found it in one of the classic Latin textbooks, Wheelock's Latin and it has been edited and adapted into prose for the sake of clarity for newbies such as myself:

Agricola et vitam et fortunam nautae saepe laudat; nauta magnum fortunam et vitam poetae saepe laudat; et poeta vitam et agros agricolae laudat. Sine philosophia avari viri de pecunia semper cogitant: multum pecuniam habent, sed nihil virum avarum satiat. 

Like all the passages in the Wheelock book, it's up to the reader to translate it so I'll do my best:

The farmer often praises both the life and fortune of the sailor; the sailor often praises both the great fortune and life of the poet, and the poet praises the life and the land of the farmer. Without philosophy, greedy men always think of money, they have a lot of money, but no greedy man is satisfied.   

I know this translation leaves a little to be desired (in fact they all do as we'll see in a moment), however it's the best I can do after only about a month. But the moral of the story, which is as old as the ages, is as Dr. Wheelock points out: "The Grass is Always Greener." 

That passage not only transmits wisdom across the millennia, it's also a great lesson in etymology:

• For starters, the word Philosophia was "borrowed" from the Greeks and is composed of two roots, phil (love) and sophia (wisdom). 
• Agricola and agros come from the same stem, agr (land). Lots of English words come from that stem, the most obvious being agriculture. 
• From vitam, and its stem vit (life) we get vital, vitality, vitamin, etc. 
• From nautam, naut (sailor) we get nautical, etc.
• From cogitant, cog (think) we get cogent, cognizant, etc. 
• From pecunia, pecun (money) we get pecuniary, pecunious, etc. 
• From viri, vir (men) we get virile, virtue, etc. 
• Fortunam, poeta, laudat and a few others should be self-explanitory. 
• Oh yes and from et cetera (and the rest), we get etc.        

Maybe it's just me but I think it's vastly more interesting learning these stems in the context of actual words in action, rather than simply as a random list of stems. 

As I mentioned, the one unequivocal reason to learn Latin is to be able to read over two thousand year's worth of thought and expression in its original form. 

Here is another piece by Horace, this time in its unedited form in verse. If you're not already familiar with it, you may recognize a couple of words in the last line: 

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi

finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios

temptaris numeros. Ut melius quicquid erit pati!

Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,

quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare              

Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi

spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

My Latin isn't nearly good enough to translate all of that but here's a link to a page with four, count 'em four different translations.

But did you catch it? "Carpe diem" and the philosophy that inspired those words, have become a pop culture phenomenon since the movie Dead Poets' Society was released in 1989. Here's a link to the scene where an English professor named John Keating, encourages his students to "seize the day." 

In addition to making me realize how much I miss Robin Williams, it is truly a wonderful, dare I say inspiring scene with no stop going un-pulled in the emotive department. 

Like the message of the earlier quote from Horace, I believe the message of this stanza is very clear, life is short, so make the most of every day. 

But according to the Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric, carpe dium has been "hijacked" by a society which has turned it into little more than a marketing gimmick. Krznaric sites the Nike slogan "Just Do It" which in itself is more or less in the spirit of the ancient mantra. However according to Krznaric:

the spirit of "Seize the day" has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and one-click buying: Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It.

Writing in JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu takes Krznaric's observations one step further:

Even life experiences have become commodities, in a world where people can no longer afford to buy a place to live. We’re encouraged instead to buy into precarious economic lifestyles celebrated by ad campaigns like freelance startup Fiverr’s “You eat a coffee for lunch… Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” This is the “carpe diem” aesthetic of a modern world of aggressive action, not all that different from the “work till you drop” mentality of industrialism.

My guess is that "working until you drop" isn't exactly what Horace had in mind when he wrote his poem.

Part of the problem, according to Kznaric and Luu lies in the translation. Luu puts it bluntly when she says that "carpe dium" is a mistranslation because "carpe" does not mean "seize" but rather "pluck", as you might pluck a flower. Obviously according to her, the two English words convey a quite different meaning. 

It's true that had Horace wanted to use an explicitly more forceful metaphor, he could have chosen the very similar word "cape", from which our word "capture" comes. 

But he didn't.

Luu suggests that using the metaphor "seize" rather than "pluck" is... 

...an example of one of the more telling ways that we mistranslate metaphors from one language to another, revealing in the process our hidden assumptions about what we really value. Metaphors may map to similar meanings across languages, but their subtle differences can have a profound effect on our understanding of the world.

As Luu suggests, we are a society who values action over passivity, and our metaphors reflect that. So it's only natural that we would choose the aggressive metaphor "seize", over the more passive "pluck".

But wait a minute. Ancient Rome wasn't exactly "pink tea for mollycoddles" either. They meant serious business as we all know, look at what they did to Jesus. So it seems a little silly to assume that an ancient Roman would be any more averse to using a forceful metaphor than we would.

It has to be remembered that except for most nouns, there is rarely a perfect one to one correspondence between words in different languages. An adage I've heard over and over again in my adventures in language learning is that words don't mean words, words evoke ideas. And different languages have different ways to express those ideas. From its appearances in a great variety of texts that survive, it turns out the word carpere (the infinite form of the verb from which the imperative carpe comes) is very flexible, that is, in different contexts it can mean a great deal of things. Indeed, many English words including "pluck", "harvest", "seize", and dozens more can be appropriately used to stand in for it. English has many similar words. 

Take the word "take":

• We can take a nap.
  
• We can take no prisoners.
• We can take the bus.
• We can take the car to the garage.
• We can tell someone to take a hike.
• We can take off our clothes.
• We can take off in an airplane.
• We can take some time off.
  
• We can take on a project.
  
• We can take the spaghetti.
• We can take credit cards.
• We can take something that doesn't belong to us. 
• We can "take it easy but take it." (Woody Guthrie)
  
• We can even take the day.

In each of those examples, the verb "take" performs a different action, and each sentence conveys a different feeling, some mundane, some passive, some defiant, and some aggressive. But even though we're using the same verb, there is no ambiguity in any of those sentences for someone who is fluent in the English language, because it's all about the context. But if we were to translate those sentences into another language, we'd most likely have to use a different verb for each one.  

Of course, Horace didn't write seize the day or pluck the day, he wrote carpe dium. And just the same as those examples of take, anyone with a good knowledge of Latin can understand what Horace meant.

Could it be though, that Horace was being intentionally a little ambiguous in his choice of carpe over cape? 

Much like ourselves, people in Ancient Rome would have had their own interpretation of what it meant for themselves to carpe dium. For some it may have meant stop and smell the roses, for others it may have meant to screw it and spend their life savings on that snazzy new chariot. After all, vita brevis est. 

Given that, it's possible that a long lost ancient Roman version of Roman Kznaric, or maybe even Horace himself might have bemoaned the fact that carpe dium was being hijacked 2,000 years ago, just as it is today.

Because as we learned from the first writing of Horace I mentioned, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

For what it's worth, as a translation I prefer "seize the day" by a mile. 

Pluck in my opinion is a terrible word. For starters it rhymes with a common English four-letter word. Imagine someone listening to that passage from Horace being read in English and mishearing the phrase as "fuck the day." Furthermore, every old comic will tell you that words with the letter "K" in them are inherently funny. Had Robin Williams used the line "pluck the day boys" in the movie, people would have thought he was making a joke. 

Most of all, when I think of pluck, I don't think of flowers, I pick those. No, I think "pluck the banjo" or "pluck the chicken".   

Shall I pluck the day like I would pluck a chicken? I don't think so.

Long story short, no matter how good the translation, it's always better in the original.

Of course as Horace reminds us, life is short and most of us mere mortals don't have the time to study the language of every piece of writing that interests us. I'll probably never get around to reading the Old Testament in its original Ancient Hebrew, the Quran in Arabic, or the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, not to mention the classic works of Chinese literature in their original Ancient Chinese, or modern Chinese for that matter. I started to read the Gospel of St. John in Latin, (In principio erat Verbum...) but had to remind myself that it too is a translation from the original Greek. 

All of these ancient languages are well worth learning, especially if you have an interest in the particular culture they are associated with. But since life is short, I'm not going to get too carried away with my bucket list. 

On the other hand:

Τα ελληνικά μπορεί να μην είναι και τόσο κακή ιδέα.

* A "dead" language is defined by linguists as a language that currently has no native speakers. That distinguishes it from an "extinct" language which is lost. Currently, Latin, a dead language by that definition, is still widely studied around the world, but it's difficult to get a reliable number of how many people actually know it, tougher still to get an accurate number of people who speak it fluently. That number ranges from about 200 (ridiculously low I think) to the tens of thousands. That's understandable as most folks study the language purely as an academic exercise, not as one to communicate verbally with other people.  

Here's a guy who definitely speaks Latin fluently. His name is Luke Ranieri and he's a strong advocate not only of learning Latin, oh yes and Ancient Greek as well, but speaking them, truly bringing those ancient languages to life. In the video below, he goes to the Vatican, where the official language is still technically Latin, and tries to find people who actually speak it. He found only a handful and as you can tell, the three priests who agreed to go on camera, speak it quite hesitantly.  

But I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a resurgence of Latin, Ancient Greek and other ancient languages in the future, thanks to of all things, the internet, and guys like Ranieri.

By the way I kind of cringe whenever I hear Latin described as being a dead language. I think eternal is more like it.

Valete!