People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 February 1894 — Unskilled Tongues. [ARTICLE]

Unskilled Tongues.

Anything out of the common in no menclature runs the risk of being burlesqued by unskilled tongues. The nurse who called her oharges Miss “Burial” and Miss “Jones” must have made their mother wish she had never christened them Beryl and Joan. As Betsy and Jane they would have come off all right. Horses, too, with fine names get strangely miscalled in the stable. One pair known by their master as Rustem and Sohrab, degenerated first into “Rusty and Soreback,” and fell ultimately into the commonplace as “the little horse and the Docthor.” There is generally somebody—a lady as a rule—in each district, on whom its finest Malaprops are fathered, sometimes quite unfairly. It is she who is reported to have made that speech about the glories of her father’s house, up to the door of which there ran a “revenue of popular trees;” she who asked her daughter to play that little “malady” she had learned at the “cemetery;” and she again who pronounced Mr. Brown as “proud as Luther;” while the tuft-hunting Mr. Smith was such a “toby” he deserved to be “tattooed” at his club. Dear Mrs. Malaprop, what should we do without her? —London Globe.