the_gneech (
the_gneech) wrote2008-02-12 09:13 am
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Entry tags:
Happy Birthday,
blue_panther!
For your present, here's today's Forgotten English (© Jeffrey Kacirk):
If there was a flow of logic to that paragraph, I certainly missed it.
-The Gneech
contumely
Language abounding with the bitterest expressions intended to subject a person to the reproach of others and to render him uneasy.--Daniel Fenning's Royal English Dictionary, 1775
Rudeness, contemptuousness.--William Grimshaw's Ladies' Lexicon and Parlour Companion, 1854
Abuse, affront; from Latin contumeo.--Nathaniel Bailey's Etymological English Dictionary, 1749
Lincoln's Birthday
Feast Day of St. Julian the Hospitaler,
a patron of hospitality, who has long comforted such travelers as circus performers and other traveling entertainers. C. E. Humphry's Manners for Women (1897) offered readers advice that sometimes ranged from verbal one-upmanship and polite backstabbing to euphemistic pleasantries: "Years of mingling in polite society are necessary to its full development, and though a delicate sense of what is due to others is the very essence of tact, it is never quite perfect without a knowledge of the gentle art of snubbing. ... The 'retort courteous' loses none of its point for being courteous, and how agreeably it compares with the bludgeon style of warfare of some fair warriors."
If there was a flow of logic to that paragraph, I certainly missed it.
-The Gneech
no subject
no subject
no subject