'Get Words'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 15, 16 April 1908, Page 9

'Get Words'

There was much good sense in a remark made upon . the swearing habit, in our hearing, the other day. • Easy to say " break off ",' quoth John Doe. ' Easy enowglhi ', rejoined Richard Roe ; ' buy a dictionary, and get words '. A too limited vocabulary is one of the causes provocative of profanity. And, personally; son:© of the most voluminous swearers that we ever met were men whose command of unprofane sl^ng and of Queen's English did not run into more than three hundred or four hundred words. Habit, of course, forges its chains on this as on other frailties. But a sufficient command of clean speech should, of itself, tend to dimiriish the temptation, to eke _ out ideas with thespeech that, if more profane, is- -less clear-cut and expressive. The noted American lecturer, Eli Perkins, once met, in a train, a commercial traveller whose poverty of rhetoric was only equalled by his wealth of coruscating profanity. 'Are you' paid for swearing,?' Eli asked. 'No ', replied the ' drummer ■' ; 'I do it for nothing '. ' Well ', said Perkins, J you work cheap. You lay aside your character as a gentleman, inflict pain on your friends, break a coirmandment, and lose your own soul — and for nothing ! You certainly do work cheap— very ehe a p ! '