Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1892 — Impromptu Definitions. [ARTICLE]

Impromptu Definitions.

The young idea is not always encouraged to shoot. At one of Sheridan’s dinner parties, the conversation turned upon the difficulty of satisfactorily defining “wit.” Forgetting that he was expected to see, hear, but say nothing, Master Tom informed the company, “Wit is that which sparkles and cuts. ” “Very good, Tom,” said his father. “Then as you have sparkled you can cut,” and poor Tom had to leave his dinner unfinished. Probably a worse fate awaited the Brooklyn boy, who, called upon to explain the meaning of “Quaker,” wrote: “A Quaker is one of a sect who never quarrel, never get into a fight, never claw/ each other, and never jaw back. Pa’s a Quaker; but ma isn’t!” An Ohio school committee must have been puzzled to decide which of two candidates for a schoolmarmship was the better fitted for the post, the ydung woman who averred that “respiration” was the prespiring of the body, or her rival, who believed “emphasis” was the putting more distress on one word than another—definitions worthy of a place beside those achieved by the English medical student responsible for: “Hypothesis, something that happens to a man after death;” and “Irony, a substance found in mineral wells, which is carefully preserved in bottles, and sold by chemists as tincture of iron.”