in school learning our language /we were given series of verbs arrayed/so that the first word was the verb’s present tense the second its past tense and the third the past participle

drink drank drunk swim swam swum  jump jumped jumped

because unlike mathematics with consistent rules, language is also an echo of historical impacts like conquests and fads and new inventions

.

in my dim remembrance of latin class at glendale high school taught by the brilliant and petitely beautiful maegene nelson up drifts the word for “this” which was “hic”

and in latin the nouns come in masculine feminine and neuter forms

and they also come in cases and we were taught five those being nominative genitive dative accusative and ablative

so for hic nominative case, the masculine was hic, the feminine hæc and the neuter hoc

in the genitive or “belonging to or derived from” case all three are hujus

this, students just starting to learn latin have for hundreds of years learned by rite by chanting repeatedly “hick, hike, hoke/hooyuss hooyuss hooyuss”

and if you o reader have that in your head too after fifty years/you are in your way my sister or brother or sibling

for our bond is a weird singsong jingle/and without it we would not quite be who we are