Motor Bus
by A.D. GodleyWhat is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo---
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!
This was once an extraoardinarily popular poem. The joke, of course, lies in declining motor and bus as if they were proper Latin nouns. 'Bus' is in reality a shortened form of omnibus, which is the dative form of omnis. (It is also the ablative form, hence the line in the poem 'Dative Be or Ablative'.) The original expression was a French use of omnibus as an adjective -- voiture omnibus meant a vehicle for everyone, and this got shortened to 'bus' in English.* Thus we get all the declensions of the fictional Latin word 'bus'. On the singular side: Bus, of course, is the nominative; Be is the vocative; Bi is the genitive; Bo is both the dative and the ablative (they each get one of the Bo's in the poem); and Bum is the accusative. On the plural side: Bi is the nominative; Borum is the genitive; Bis is the ablative; Bos is the accusative. Motor is also declined appropriately, as an adjectival noun.
Bo Motori clamitabo / Ne Motore caedar a Bo is absolute brilliance: it means 'I will cry out against the Motor Bus, lest I be struck down by a Motor Bus'.
* This has nothing to do with the poem, but this is vividly reminding me of the time in sixth grade (I think) when I lost points on an English assignment about etymology for (correctly) saying that 'cab' was the shortened form of cabriolet. 'Cabriolet' is related to a word for 'goat', and it was a popular way of describing how the cabriolet carriage moved, i.e., in a skipping, bouncy kind of way. Cabriolets eventually got replaced by heavier, more durable hackney carriages; nobody knows why they were called 'hackneys', but popularly all vehicles for hire had come to be called 'cabs', so the hackneys often were still called 'cabs' too. At the end of the nineteenth century, cab owners began installing mechanical and electrical taximeters to better keep track of fares, hence the name 'taxi cab'. (The word 'taxi' is indeed related to the word 'tax'; a taximeter is a measuring device for what you are being charged or 'taxed'. We have since shortened 'taximeter' to 'meter'.) The assignment, of course, had been written in the expectation that someone would say that 'cab' is the shortened form of 'taxi cab'. But this is not right. 'Taxi' is a shortened form of 'taxi cab'; but 'taxi cab' is an expanded form of 'cab', which predates it by over a hundred years. I suppose the assignment accidentally did its job, though; I remember nothing else whatsoever about it, and, indeed, very little from the class, but I will never, ever, ever forget the etymology of 'cab'.