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Updated: May 13, 2025
The talk was in good, up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an intelligent point of view. "Are you American born?" Bessie inquired by and by.
If we work this right," he added in a swift aside, "this will be good for a return ticket, all right!" The old man withdrew his hand from the grasp of Beatrice and folded both arms across his breast with simple dignity. "I rejoice that I have lived to this time," he stammered slowly, gropingly, as though each word, each distorted and mispronounced syllable had to be sought with difficulty.
This person was a member who was not connected with the government, and who neither had, nor deserved to have, the ear of the House, a noisy, purse-proud, illiterate demagogue, whose Cockney English and scraps of mispronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers, Alderman Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange proceedings produced a ferment through the whole political world.
"What's that stringy looking grass over there?" pursued the man, undismayed by her manner. "Clove pinks." Nothing, she told herself indignantly, could persuade her to encourage the acquaintance of a man who mispronounced his words so outrageously. "And here?" He pointed to the flower-bed she was watering. "Mignonette and nasturtium seeds." "When will they come up?" "Very soon if they're watered."
Rare was the land that had not sent representatives to this great dirt-shoveling congress. A Syrian merchant gasped for breath and fell over his counter in delight to find that I, too, had been in his native Zakleh, five Punjabis all but died of pleasure when I mispronounced three words of their tongue.
The Mexican, like the Spaniard, never laughs at the most atrocious attempts at his tongue by foreigners, and even the peons were often extremely quick-witted in catching the idea from a few mispronounced words. "The man with the hair ," I said one day, in describing a workman I wished summoned; and not for the moment recalling the Castilian for curly, I twirled my fingers in the air.
The glass-bead curtain jingled, and a maid backed through it giggling, followed in a hurry by a European, dressed in a white duck apology for evening clothes. He seemed a little the worse for drink, but not too drunk to recognize the real Yasmini when he saw her and to blush crimson for having acted like an idiot. "Queen of the Night!" he said in Hindustani that was peculiarly mispronounced.
"That's as bad as what Helen insisted they sang last Christmas, in the infant class, something about 'Christmas soda's on the breeze! I don't know what she means," said Cricket, forgetting that Billy would not understand. It was such a relief when any one else, even old Billy, mispronounced words, and thus gave her a chance to laugh at them.
'Come, said he, 'this is better than I had expected; and if you choose to be dutiful in the station to which it has pleased God to call you, you will find me a very kind old fellow. I like your looks, he added, calling me by my name, which he scandalously mispronounced.
When his aged relatives mispronounced the magic word kopje, or betrayed their belief that a donga was an inaccessible mountain he brought the big guns of his heavy satire to bear on the little target of their ignorance without remorse.
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