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Updated: June 27, 2025
He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose.
A writer who aims to be widely read to-day must perpetually halt, must perpetually hesitate at the words that arise in his mind; he must ask himself how many people will stick at this word altogether or miss the meaning it should carry; he must ransack his memory for a commonplace periphrase, an ingenious rearrangement of the familiar; he must omit or overaccentuate at every turn.
The age in which are fabricated such fine, such brilliant stuffs, such elegant furniture, and when are made such rich porcelains, must needs be the age of periphrase and circumlocution.
The fact that the framers of the Constitution refused to blot its pages with the word "slave" or "slavery;" and that, by periphrase and the substitution of "persons" for "slaves," they sought to conceal from posterity and the world the mortifying fact, that slavery existed under a government based on the principle, that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," contains volumes of proof, that they looked upon American slavery as a decaying institution; and that they would naturally shape the Constitution to the abridgment and the extinction, rather than the extension and perpetuity of the giant vice of the country.
By some freak of fate she had for parents a plumber and a washerwoman "poor but very honest people," was Quentin's periphrase; their poverty of late considerably relieved by the thoughtful son-in-law, and their honesty perhaps fortified at the same time.
Leaving out the delicate and difficult periphrase by which her mother's shame would have to be explained to an innocent school-girl what right could he have assumed to tell it? As the guardian who had never counseled or protected her? As an acquaintance of hardly an hour ago? Who would have such a right?
It was with an effort that he steadied himself sufficiently to ask the usual conventional question in the usual conventional tone. "Is she any better this morning, Ann?" "Yes, sir, she is much better," the Yorkshirewoman answered solemnly. "She is where none can harm her now." Yes; it was the usual periphrase of these vulgar people. He knew all their cant by heart. "You mean to say she is dead?"
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