What does “mensa” mean? [closed]
The reference "could not decline the Latin mensa to save their souls" is a reference to doing something which should be extremely easy. Mensa is a perfectly regular first-declension feminine noun, and declines in a set way:
| Case | Major Use | Latin Example |
English Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | Subject | mensa | table |
| Accusative | Direct Object | mensam | table |
| Genitive | Possessive | mensae | of the table |
| Dative | Indirect Object | mensae | to/for the table |
| Ablative | Means or Manner | mensa | by/with the table |
| Vocative | Direct address | mensa | O table! |
However, there were some who could not do this even if their very lives depended on it.
I think the meaning of mensa is not relevant here. In Latin, one can decline a noun, by giving all its forms, one after the other. Bell is saying that even those who learned to do that back in school, may no longer remember it.
"mensa" here is not English. It is literally the Latin word mensa, which happens to translate to "table", but the English translation is not relevant.
Rather, the word is used here as an example of a very simple Latin word that an adult -- whose learning as a schoolchild is forgotten -- might be totally unable to decline (in the grammatical sense of "to inflect"), even if the salvation of his soul depended on making such a declension.