Like many provincial newspapers, that to which I am
attached makes a feature of printing the social happenings in villages
of the surrounding country, and these out-of-town correspondents "don't
do a thing to" the English language. One of them invariably refers to
the social lights of his vicinity as "our prominent socialists," and
describes some individual as "happening to an accident." To another,
every festal occasion is "a bower of beauty and a scene of fairyland."
Blue-penciling they resent, and one of them wrote to complain that a
descriptive effort of his had been "much altered and deranged." The
paper also publishes portraits of children and young women, and it is in
the descriptions accompanying these pictures that the rural
correspondent excels himself. One wound up his eulogy in an apparently
irrepressible burst of enthusiasm: "She is indeed a _tout ensemble_." A
child of six months was described as "studious"; and another
correspondent went into details thus: "Little Willie has only one large
blue eye, the other having been punched out by his brother with a stick,
by accident.
Pages:
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34