Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton, and Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spellers you ever saw. And their grammar is simply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for the grammarians. When they saw a word or a phrase they liked they went to it. If the grammarians didn't agree with them it was up to the grammarians. Chaucer should worry.
Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right.
Professor Lounsbury: The question is this: Are freshmen made for the English language or is language made for freshmen? Language is like a human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty years.
Dr. Hutchinson: I agree with Professor Lounsbury, speaking from the standpoint of physiology. Constant use of a plural verb with a plural subject plays the deuce with the larynx. You know what the larynx is, gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the larynx under the operation of grammatical rules. It gets the habit, and the first law of health is to avoid all habits. What you want to do is to shake up the larynx by feeding it with new forms of expression. When a man says "I done it," it imparts a healthy jolt to the delicate muscles of the throat, limbers up his aorta and his diaphragm, and reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.
Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?
Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for the magazines.
Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has something to say he will say it?
Professor Münsterberg: We have an excellent illustration on this point in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. In reply to the question, "Name the first two Presidents of the United States," one candidate wrote, "The first pressident was Gorge Washington; his predeceassor was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the extraordinary psychological correlation between thought and expression in such a reply.
Professor Hart: I don't think the young man was guilty of an injustice with regard to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that Hamilton was one of the principal founders of the system of privilege which has produced, in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be compelled to wage a campaign for social justice and I should not be under the necessity of writing Bull Moose history for Collier's.