You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very insignificant premises.This is eminently true of manners and forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about a person.Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly pronounced HAALTH) - instead of, How do you do? or, How are you?
Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction." Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's, - and other such expressions.One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house, - bow, arrows, wings, and all complete.A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief question!
[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door it lay.]
That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, EX PEDEHERCULEM.He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you may judge of the barrel." EX PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, EXUNGUE MINIMI DIGITI PEDIS, HERCULEM, EJUSQUE PATREM, MATREM, AVOSET PROAVOS, FILIOS, NEPOTES ET PRONEPOTES! Talk to me about your [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O"revealed Giotto, - as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais, - so all a man's antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.
Possibilities, Sir? - said the divinity-student; can't a man who says HAOW? arrive at distinction?
Sir, - I replied, - in a republic all things are possible.But the man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of.Doesn't Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a false quantity uttered in early life? OUR public men are in little danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of introducing Latin into their speeches, - for good and sufficient reasons.But they are bound to speak decent English, - unless, indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.
However, it is not for me to talk.I have made mistakes enough in conversation and print.I never find them out until they are stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me.I have no doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and remember them all before another.How one does tremble with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the impertinences of the CAPTATORES VERBORUM, those useful but humble scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as they go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics; - how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or broadcloth.
[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making this record of the date that nobody may think it was written in wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the invasion of any individual SCARABAEUS GRAMMATICUS.]
- I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this table when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure.I should be very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they did not.
