An old Fairy Tale
As often as not the vulgar girl has both sense and sensibility. Of the latter fact she is profoundly ashamed, and has been known to say of a book that has deeply agitated her—
"I got to feel quite eye-in-water over it."
She affects to care, only for the gaieties of life, but knows something of its gravities, and has often a bit of heroine in her. The worst thing about her is her speech. "Jolly" is her favourite adverb. She is jolly glad when she is not jolly mad, and she will soon describe herself as jolly sad. She uses the verb "mashed" hideously; where her prototype of twenty years ago said "swell" she says "swagger;" and she does not stick at saying "beastly." For the rest, she has always some pet word of the hour. Thus "dotty" is an adjective now much in favour with her. Thereby hangs a tale. The vulgar girl sometimes knows Italian, and it was she who translated a line from a famous lady's epitaph—
"Vergine magnanime, dotta, divina."
"A virgin magnanimous, dotty, divine."
On the other hand there are vulgar girls who do not know Latin, and one of them has been known to say "effluvia" for "smell," the Latin for "smell" being "effluvium."
The pronunciation of her own language is by some thought to offer insuperable difficulties to the English vulgar girl, who pronounces the "t" in "often" but does not pronounce it in "Westminster," whose favourite colour, she has been heard to aver, is "terrar cottar," who plays an instrument which she calls "the varlin," who says "towards" and "interesting," who pronounces "ate" "et," and whose vocabulary has been known to include the words "pantomine," "Feb'uary" and "sec'etary." So far is this list from exhausting the faults of pronunciation of the said vulgar girl, that it must be added that she gives to no one vowel its proper sound, while among the consonants "h" initial and "g" final stumble her. She is particularly careless regarding the latter consonant when the form which her vulgarity takes is that of would-be "smartness."
Very abominable to this girl is grammar, which is all but invariably set at defiance by her. Thus, even when she does not say "it were," as did Mrs. Cluppins, she favours such phrasing as "those sort of," "very pleased," "different to" and "between you and I."