Really, it's just as well that nobody knows Latin anymore. Imagine if every Mundane who saw the full Corps logo – not that many of them ever do – had a well-trained eye for inflections; we'd never hear the end of it.
Oh, you never noticed? Look again sometime. An irregularly hexagonal shield enclosing the Greek letter Ψ, and decorated with mullets, laurel leaves – and two Latin words: Maternis and Paternis. If you don't know the language, it's easy enough to think that that's a simple reference to the familiar Corps mantra: "The Corps Is Mother, The Corps Is Father". But not so; that phrase, if translated into Latin, would be "Corpus Mater Est, Corpus Pater Est", with the two words on the logo nowhere to be seen.
A sound Latinist would know that. He would know that the words on the shield aren't any form of mother and father, but of the adjectives derived from them: "maternal", "paternal". Or not even that, rather, for those would be maternum and paternum; maternis and paternis are the plural ablative forms – the ones you would use if several mother-like or father-like entities stood in some adverbial relation to the verb you were using. "I did it maternals-wise": it isn't good English, but it gives the sense of "Id feci maternis" better than any more graceful syntax could.
And as soon as our sound Latinist realized that, of course, the next question he would ask is, "What's the verb, then? An ablative means nothing without its verb; what verb are these two words supposed to modify?"
And that's the beautiful part. Because the answer, quite simply, is that they're meant to modify just what they do modify – the thing that they adorn, that they're sitting right on top of. It isn't a verb in Latin, to be sure, but it is in English – and just the sort of verb that might well take an ablative of separation.
Shield.
The Corps shields us maternals-wise, shields us paternals-wise. That is, the Corps, being truly mother and father, shields us from all those who are merely like mothers and fathers to us: those who, on a purely animal level, provided the sperm and ova that brought us into existence. So many of them think they have a higher claim on us – that, just because they begot or bore us, therefore we have some sort of duty to honor them, obey them, even love them. As though a telepath could ever have that kind of duty to a Mundane.
But we can't have that kind of thing getting out, of course. It's hard enough, these days, to talk Mundanes into letting their children join the Corps; if they imagined that we regarded them as mere meat envelopes, to be quietly laid aside once they'd done their job of breeding the future, it would be impossible. Far better to let them think of us as just a kind of boarding school for mind-readers, and only letting the children themselves know differently once we have them firmly in our grasp.
Every family has its secrets, doesn't it?
So, yes, it's a very good thing that sound Latinists rarely get a good look at the Corps logo. But, for you and me, it's another matter; it's vital that we not only see it, but understand it, meditate on it, and commit its message truly and deeply to heart.
Corpus Solum Mater Est. Corpus Solum Pater Est.
Disclaimer: Babylone V opere Straczynskii, eam non possideo. (Lest anyone think I don't know what an ablative absolute really is.)