Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1883 — The Dull Thunder. [ARTICLE]

The Dull Thunder.

It is evident that there will have to be a national party organized, perhaps a dynamite party, to annihilate the fiends who write for newspapers and everlastingly use the expression, “dull thud.” With these writers anything and everything falls with a dull thud, from the carcass of a man who is hung for crime to the (esthetic and fairy like maiden who experiments on roller skates. Every day for a month the dispatches have contained a “dull thud” or two, and the local writers of the city and country papers have described the falling of more things with “dull thuds” than woulfl fill a box ear. The expression originated with a reporter for a paper published in Europe, many centuries ago, in reference to a man who fell off the highest pinnacle of a mountain, aDd struck several miles below, with a “dull thud.” It might have been an appropriate expression at that time, but during the hundreds of years that have passed since the dull thud has been worn so that it creates a smile when the wayfaring man reads about such a fall. The dull thud is almost equal, in amusement, to the expression always used by new reporters in describing a fire, “the scene beggars description.” Many people have been driven to desperation by reading of the dull thud, and a stop should be put to it. Some newspapers make a rule that any person who uses the expression “dull thud” shall be at once disc liar ged, but within a week the managing editor, or the proprietor of the paper will white something editorial, descriptive of a fall, and will unconsciously work in the dull thud, when, of course, the rule is suspended. There is no expression that seems to linger about in the-recesses of the brain, ready to come forth unawares, like the dull thud. Dramatic critics, in speaking of some unusual bit of acting, describe the heroine falling, swooning, into the arms of the hero, with a dull thud. If we could have a sharp thud, for a change, it would brace newspaper readers up so they could stand another season of dull thud, but nobody seems to take the responsibility of making the change. What it wants is a society of desperate men, men who would not hesitate to commit murder, who shall band together and be bound by a bloody oath. It should be their duty to read the papers and when they see the expression “dull thud” they should haunt the newspaper office until they have discovered the perpetrator, and then follow him to the free-lunch counter, and while he is firing the liver sausage down his neck, poison his beer, or choke him to death, and place upon the body a paper with a skull and cross-bones, and a warning, “This shall bs the fate of all dull thudders.” A reign of terror could be inaugurated that would, after a few hundred dull thudders had been slain, wipe out the senseless praetice of causing everything to fall with a dull thud. Let such a band be organized, and cause the first man who uses the expression, “dull thud,” to fall in his tracks, by the' hand of the avengers, with a’dull thud. — Peck’s Sv/n.