With all due respect to Jonah  ("After all, Kerry is an awful politician, a human toothache with the charisma of a 19th-century Oxford Latin tutor." ),  I had a lot of 19th-century Oxford Latin and Greek type-teachers. Believe me, for all their Anglo eccentricities, they were all funnier and more charismatic than Kerry. I'd rather listen any day to their lectures on the differences between sequences of tenses in Latin versus sequences of moods in Greek than snooze through Kerry's contorted clarifications.