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Show osianr or cant phbases. Where Soma Expressions Dally Heard Fist Cam Into Use. - ' Royall Tyler, who was born in Boston in 1757. visited London in 1809. From there he wrote a letter to a friend in New England, a bit of which may not be uninteresting to -readers of today: Some years since ' "all the rage" was the cant, and an Englishman asserted that universal philanthropy and peace were "all the rage." To this succeeded "quia and "Quizzical;" every man of common sense -was a quia and every blockhead quizzical. To these succeeded "bore;" everything animate and even inanimate was a "bore." a "horrid bore!" I am not certain that I give you the correct order of succession, for, indeed, in-deed, I am not ambitious of the correctness correct-ness of the genealogy of nonsense. The cant expressions now in vogue are "I owe you one" and "that's a good one." But besides these evanescent vulgarisms of fashionable colloquy there are a number of words now familiar, not merely in transient converse, but even in English fine writing, which are of vulgar origin and Illegitimate descent, which disgust an admirer of the writers of their Augustan age and degrade their finest compositions by a grotesque air of pert vivacity. 'Among these- is the adjective "clever," a word not derived from those pure and rich sources which have given all. that Is valuable to the English language a word not used by any English prose writer of eminence until the reign of George HI., nor even Introduced into a serious poem until adopted by Cow per a word which, if we may Judge of adjectives as we do of men, by their associates, shows the baseness of Its origin by the company it keeps, being generally, coupled with "fellow," a term I conceive of no respect except In court and colleges, Brooklyn Eagle. |