Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not—and this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid” vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard) but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant, I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending, later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his fortunes—he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what, after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,” employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note.
Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer for the pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,” as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the tittle on—No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary tittle—a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as usual, I didn’t know what they were?
By this time I was beginning to be verbally groggy. What, I wondered, was—or, rather, wasn’t—“a scintilla of evidence”? (For, oddly enough, one is never informed that there is a scintilla of evidence, but merely that there isn’t.) And just how did it happen, in the first place, that a lack of evidence should have been called a “scintilla,” whereas a certain kind of expensive gray fur was called a “chinchilla.” Scintilla chinchilla, scintilla chinchilla—the jury was unable to find a chinchilla of evidence, although Mrs. Vasterbolt was present at the trial in a handsome coat of the costliest scintilla. Why not? But as madness seemed to be lurking in that direction, I hastened feverishly on to “adamant.” Oh, yes, I know it’s something very hard and unyielding and, in the kind of novels that no one reads any more, someone is, at a critical moment, always “as” it—never “like” it. But what is it? It might be some sort of a mythological cliff against which people were supposed ineffectually to have hurled themselves; it might be a kind of metal, or a particularly durable precious stone, or a satisfactory species of paving material. It might be any old thing; I don’t know. What in the dickens does it mean to “dree your own weird”? For, as I almost tore off a page in my anxiety to turn it, my eyes caught sight of: “‘Everyone must dree his own weird,’ she answered, sententiously.” Early in life it had dawned on me that to be told you must “dree your own weird” was merely a more obscure and delicate fashion of telling you that you must “skin your own skunk”; and yet I very much doubt if the verb “to dree” means to skin, or if “weird,” used as a noun, has much connection with the fragrant little denizen of our forests whom we all, I trust, are accustomed to refer to as the mephitis Americana.
On and on I toiled for another hour, at the end of which time I had a formidable list of ordinary words belonging to my own language, as to whose real meaning I was completely in the dark. To-day I intended to look them all up and write a charming little paper on them, primarily designed, of course, to make dear reader gasp at the scope and thoroughness of my education. But the day is indescribably hot, and, as I have been away, my dictionary, unfortunately, is gritty with dust. To get up and slap at the corpulent thing with a damp towel would be most repulsive. I shan’t do it. Instead I shall recall that the most intellectual nation in the world has a saying to the effect that, “On peut être fort instruit sons avoir d’éducation.”
JUST A LETTER
THE other day I received a letter from an old friend of mine with whom I have talked for many years now, only in long letters at long intervals. He is a man of about thirty-seven, but he still writes long letters. This one, like all the others, is pleasant in spots, and I have therefore submitted it to a sort of epistolary, dry-cleaning process and extracted some of the spots. Here they are:—
As you see, I am at Newport. I have been visiting various persons here for almost a month now, and as the glory will have soon departed, or rather, as I shall have soon departed, I thought I should give you a vicarious whiff of high life while I can.
It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather, and with the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. They probably are. Indeed, after a dinner, a late dance, and the remaining few hours of last night spent in playing bridge, my fearless little mirror tells me this morning that I look quite all of twenty-six. One hears much about the follies of the rich, but I am beginning to feel that they are as nothing compared to the follies of the poor. For the paltry sum I last night lost to a man worth eighteen or twenty millions is almost the exact sum I meant to distribute among the servants of my hostess when I gracefully make room for somebody else on the day after tomorrow. Before I began to write to you, I made no end of hectic little calculations on the back of an envelope, but as yet they don’t seem to be leading me anywhere except into the hands of a receiver. However—