Declenchuns

In German, nouns declent, which is not as inappropriate as it sounds. Each noun comes in 4 flavors (aka cases) depending on its role in a sentence. In Modern English, only pronouns and the word "who" still declent, although in Old English, all nouns did. Quick example: in the sentence "I used to like elephants until one sat on me and ruptured my spleen," "I" is the subject, "me" the indirect object, and "my" either the irregular genitive of "I" or a possessive pronoun. (Wikipedia has an even dirtier name for the use of " 's " to form the possessive, which I won't discuss here. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic.) In short, English prounouns change how they are written and spoken according to a set of morphological rules in order to indicate a change from subject to object.

Imagine for a moment that every noun did this:
Is that your coffee?
Were you enjoying that coffeen?
Because I think I just put salt in your coffeem.
Exciting, huh?

What I like about declensions are not the endless fill-in-the-blank exercises it takes to learn them nor their basic function, which, as far as I can tell, is rendered obsolete by a rigid word order.

What I like is the word "declension" itself, because it is something nouns do and not something that is done to them (as with verbs and the act of conjugation) and because it contains, if only when spoken and only by accident, the word "clench," and so makes me picture hundreds of nouns wearing matching pinneys and sweatpants, lined up in a high school gymnasium clenching and unclenching as they do their noun calisthenics: Day doing her sit-ups; Night stretching to touch his toes; Patience stumbling through squat-thrusts; Sidewalk trying to do a back-bend.

This image is comforting. If I have to work so hard on these damn declensions, then godammit so should they.