Greetings from My Mountain Cabin,
When I think of what passes for oral communication today, I muse what it would be like if professional talking heads spoke the way today's younger (and not so younger) generation do.
✶ TV Evening Newscaster: "There was like a tornado in y'know Oklahoma this afternoon. When I saw it, I was y'know, like 'Wow.' The devastation appeared to be like total, if you will. Ummmm, for a y'know on-scene report, here is ummmm reporter, Ima Fairchild."
Widely recognized as the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (and a host of other great novels), Mark Twain was so much more than a gifted story-teller. He had a razor-sharp wit, which he used frequently.
Would that the majority of people in our day and time possess the desire to express themselves fully using the rich potential of the English language, as did Mr. Twain. I guess I can dream.
For your amusement, here are a few of Mark Twains gems:
✶ "Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
✶ "The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example."
✶ "No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
✶ "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
✶ "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
✶ "He imagined he was in love with her, whereas I think she did the imagining for him."
✶ "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
✶ "The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
✶ "Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething."
✶ "Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live."
✶ "The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice."
✶ "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with a verb in his mouth."
✶ "It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you."
✶ "Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."
✶ "The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives."
✶ "We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us."
✶ "Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows he did not know how to tell them."
✶ "There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure."
✶ "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
✶ "After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside without her."
✶ "There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce."
✶ "Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."
✶ "Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid."
Ummmm, like have a y'know terrific day, if you will,
Ed
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