End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.
--I think there is one habit,--I said to our company a day or two
afterwards--worse than that of punning. It is the gradual
substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly
characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel
idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen
expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,
--FAST or SLOW. Man's chief end was to be a BRICK. When the great
calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken
of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP. Nine-tenths of human existence
were summed up in the single word, BORE. These expressions come to
be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or
indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of
intellectual bankruptcy;--you may fill them up with what idea you
like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the
treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing
smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi
spring up most luxuriantly. Don't think I undervalue the proper
use and application of a cant word or phrase.
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