ose who understand nothing of its meaning, that it
is becoming a synonym for vulgarity and imitation. To speak of the proper
use of a finger bowl or the ability to introduce two people without a
blunder as being "evidence of culture of the highest degree" is precisely
as though evidence of highest education were claimed for who ever can do
sums in addition, and read words of one syllable. Culture in its true
meaning is widest possible education, _plus_ especial refinement and
taste.

The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly
tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver,"
"taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling
blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical
of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude.

All colloquial expressions are little foxes that spoil the grapes of
perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance
of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys
root and vine.

In the choice of words, we can hardly find a better guide than the lines
of Alexander Pope:

"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

=PRONUNCIATION=

Traits of pronunciation which are typical of whole sections of the
country, or accents inherited from European parents must not be confused
with crude pronunciations that have their origin in illiteracy. A
gentleman of Irish blood may have a brogue as rich as plum cake, or
another's accent be soft Southern or flat New England, or rolling
Western; and to each of these the utterance of the others may sound too
flat, too soft, too harsh, too refined, or drawled, or clipped short, but
not uncultivated.

To a New York ear, which ought to be fairly unbiased since the New York
accent is a composite of all accents, English women chirrup and twitter.
But the beautifully modulated, clear-clipped enunciation of a cultivated
Englishman, one who can move his jaws and not swallow his words whole,
comes as near to perfection in English as the diction of the Comedie
Francaise comes to perfection in French.

The Boston accent is very crisp and in places suggestive of the best
English but the vowels are so curiously flattened that the speech has a
saltless effect. There is no rhyming w