Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1886 — Honi Soil Qui Maly Pease. [ARTICLE]

Honi Soil Qui Maly Pease.

We are prudes all—American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, East or West, wherever-the English tongue is spoken—potatoes, prunes, and prism are our watchwords. We must not call a spade a spade, but a silver spoon. We mnst not say “we are going to bed,” but “we are about to retire.” We must not say “take off our clothes,” but “disrobe,” 'Like the girl at Macy’s, corner of Fourteenth street and Sixth avenue, we cannot venture to assert that we have eaten our fill, but that “we have had an elegant sufficiency.” The difference of sex may be alluded to only in periphrasis. The simplest terms in the lauguarge are to be avoided like the plague, because of some hidden meaning they have acquired among the low and depraved, and which the innocent and well-bred people should not be cognizant of. Pure women are popularly supposed by the great Anglo-Saxon race to be well informed of the slang current among thieves and their feminine associates, and to blush when they hear some perfectly innocent word or sentence, which may have been tortured into an evil significance at the corner of Bleecker and Mercer streets, New York, or in the Seven Dials, London. Hogues’ Latin is not a branch of female education, yet are our women supposed to be so familiar with argot as to extract the hidden vileness out of our ordinary speech, as a chemist distills poison from simples. In England one must not say “bug”—that is “positively shocking;” one must allude to those nocturnal wanderers as “pests” or “Norfolk-Howards.” In America one must not mention the male of the domestic fowl save as a “rooster,” ignoring the fact that hens must roost as well as their liege lords, or else go sleepless to an untimely grave, leaving the feathered husband a disconsolate widower. Prudes all, my masters —“out of the abundance of the heart the mcuth speaketh.” A scarbrous mind will find congenial pruriency in the babble of an infant, while a free speech is the surest index of a guileless soul. Coarse phrases and vulgarity are, of course, to be shunned, even in the most familiar conversation; for no man can touch pitch and not be defiled. But to attribute evil to the common names and qualities of things bespeaks a mind conscious of evil, not of good. “To the pure all things are pure,” and the ascription of foul meaning to fair speech is simply an insult to the pure women who are supposed to be offended when no offense was meant. No matter in the whole book or volume of Heraldry isxnore to be regarded than th# of the English garter,/torn soil qui maly pense.—New York Mirror.