There are certain words which have been singled out and misused by the undiscriminating until their value is destroyed.  Long ago “elegant” was turned from a word denoting the essence of refinement and beauty, into gaudy trumpery.  “Refined” is on the verge.  But the pariah of the language is culture!  A word rarely used by those who truly possess it, but so constantly misused by those who understand nothing of its meaning, that it is becoming a synonym for vulgarity and imitation.  To speak of the proper use of a finger bowl or the ability to introduce two people without a blunder as being “evidence of culture of the highest degree” is precisely as though evidence of highest education were claimed for who ever can do sums in addition, and read words of one syllable.  Culture in its true meaning is widest possible education, plus especial refinement and taste.

The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting.  Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but “flivver,” “taxi,” the “movies,” “deadly” (meaning dull), “feeling fit,” “feeling blue,” “grafter,” a “fake,” “grouch,” “hunch” and “right o!” are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude.

All colloquial expressions are little foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys root and vine.

In the choice of words, we can hardly find a better guide than the lines of Alexander Pope: 

    “In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
    Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: 
    Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
    Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

=PRONUNCIATION=

Traits of pronunciation which are typical of whole sections of the country, or accents inherited from European parents must not be confused with crude pronunciations that have their origin in illiteracy.  A gentleman of Irish blood may have a brogue as rich as plum cake, or another’s accent be soft Southern or flat New England, or rolling Western; and to each of these the utterance of the others may sound too flat, too soft, too harsh, too refined, or drawled, or clipped short, but not uncultivated.

To a New York ear, which ought to be fairly unbiased since the New York accent is a composite of all accents, English women chirrup and twitter.  But the beautifully modulated, clear-clipped enunciation of a cultivated Englishman, one who can move his jaws and not swallow his words whole, comes as near to perfection in English as the diction of the Comedie Francaise comes to perfection in French.

The Boston accent is very crisp and in places suggestive of the best English but the vowels are so curiously flattened that the speech has a saltless effect.  There is no rhyming word as flat as the way they say “heart”—­“haht.”  And “bone” and “coat”—­“bawn,” “cawt,” to rhyme with awe!