Twentieth Century Culture and Deportment / Or the Lady and Gentleman at Home and Abroad; Containing Rules of Etiquette for All Occasions, Including Calls; Invitations; Parties; Weddings; Receptions; Dinners and Teas; Etiquette of the Street; Public Places, Etc., Etc. Forming a Complete Guide to Self-Culture; the Art of Dressing Well; Conversation; Courtship; Etiquette for Children; Letter-Writing; Artistic Home and Interior Decorations, Etc.

by Maud C. Cooke

Slang and Exaggerations.

By our own speech it is that we are sure to be judged, for,—

“’Tis only man can words create,

And cut the air to sounds articulate

By nature’s special charter. Nay, speech can

Make a shrewd discrepance ’twixt man and man.

It doth the gentleman from the clown discover;

And from a fool the great philosopher.

As Solon said to one in judgment weak:—

‘I thought thee wise until I heard thee speak.’”

And if we talk with flippancy and exaggeration, load our sentences with slang phrases, and preface and punctuate them with oft-repeated expressions of “Say!” “Well!” “You know,” “Do tell,” and so on, ad infinitum, all wisdom, or propriety of speech will be lost.

It is difficult to believe in the refinement of a girl who permits her fresh young lips to utter the slang of the bar-room hanger-on, the gambler and the street gamin.

Equally difficult is it to believe in the absolute truthfulness of one who declares to you that the heat of a lovely June day is “simply awful” or “perfectly terrible,” from sheer wonder as to what terms she would use to characterize the intense heat of some sweeping fire.

THE INDUSTRIOUS HOUSEWIFE.

Again, it is hard to understand the taste of one who informs you gravely that “the chicken salad was too lovely for anything!” or the last evening’s sunset was “perfectly elegant!” The Websterian definition of “elegant” being “polished, stylish, refined, etc.,” it is to be wished that all perpetrators of like sins could meet the punishment a young lady once dealt to a gentleman who remarked with great effusion: “This moonlight is perfectly elegant!” To this observation she answered with gravity, “Yes, it really is very stylish!”

Let, therefore, all who strive for the grace of good breeding, men and women, boys and girls alike, “set a watch over their lips and keep the door of their mouth,” for “words have wings, and so soon as their cage, the mouth, is opened, out they fly and mount beyond our reach, and past recovery.”