When Winston Churchill was a boy at school, his teacher — like all good British teachers in those days — made him memorize Latin declensions. To do this, as I vividly recall, you have to write up a list of the different endings (“cases”) a noun can have depending on its role in the sentence. It’s dominus, “master,” if the master is beating his slave, but dominum if the slave turns around and hits the master back. Serves the master right, you might think, but that’s his concern. Your concern is the list of endings, twelve in total, all of which can technically be attached to any noun that fits the pattern. The noun Churchill’s teacher gave him to practice with was mensa, table.
In running mensa through its declension, Churchill inevitably came across a particularly vexing case: the vocative. You use the vocative when you want to call out someone’s or something’s name directly, as in, “Hey, master (domine)! Stop hitting that slave.” Only for Churchill it was O mensa! (“O, table!”) The future prime minister quite reasonably asked his instructor what the earthly meaning of such a phrase could be. Churchill records the exchange:
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