Here and there,
no doubt, a pun may be made that for some exceptional reason becomes
a matter of genuine wit. But the great mass of the English puns
that disfigure the Press every week are mere pointless verbalisms
that to the American mind cause nothing but weariness.
But even worse than the use of puns is the peculiar pedantry, not to
say priggishness, that haunts the English expression of humour. To
make a mistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a wrong ending to
a Latin word is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman,
perhaps, it might be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I
imagine that if an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin
that any of our classical scholars can command would be about
equivalent to the French of a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer.
Yet one finds even the immortal Punch citing recently as a very funny
thing a newspaper misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi
et orbos," or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was
some further point in it that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't
funny. Neither is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes,
says Archimeeds; why shouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English
scale of values in these things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can
pronounce Chicago properly and they think nothing of that. But if a
person mispronounces the name of a Greek village of what O.
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