It's a weird situation for a weird verb. Memento is an imperative form meaning "remember/be mindful". The plural form would be "mementote mori", but that makes no sense here at all, so I agree it would have been better to leave it alone as a fixed Latin expression grafted onto English.
Originally I thought the title was trying to be clever (expected something about breath mints, perhaps).
Nice to see The Baffler still kicking around, though!
Edit: the more I think of it, the more I think it's okay -- it is just a play on the phrase and our borrowed noun "momento". Objects that have died in relevance in some way, rather than things that remind us of our mortality directly. Surely the use of Latin in English is not too far from once ubiquitous and now largely forgotten ashtrays.
Well, I'm right on the Latin grammar, too, but that's an irrelevancy (lol -- I'm a particular kind of fool, if not full-stack). In fact, I think the deeper idea of the essay really is about our own historicity seen through the ephemera of the things that populate our own lives.
If you're writing at a desk, look about you -- what do you see? How much of that would be recognizable in 1, 2, 5 generations (about a century) hence? How much would be intelligible, but quaint (or benighted)? Ultimately the little essay is about ourselves, our own mortality: it is about us as ephemera.
Originally I thought the title was trying to be clever (expected something about breath mints, perhaps).
Nice to see The Baffler still kicking around, though!
Edit: the more I think of it, the more I think it's okay -- it is just a play on the phrase and our borrowed noun "momento". Objects that have died in relevance in some way, rather than things that remind us of our mortality directly. Surely the use of Latin in English is not too far from once ubiquitous and now largely forgotten ashtrays.