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CHAPTER III
AIRS AND GRACES
Certain types of humour—Elegant variation—Inversion—Archaism —Metaphor—Repetition—Miscellaneous.
CERTAIN TYPES OF HUMOUR
SOME of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become a part of the injudicious novice's stock-in-trade. Olfactory organ, once no doubt an agreeable substitute for 'nose', has ceased to be legal tender in literature, and is felt to mark a low level in conversation. No amount of classical authority can redeem a phrase that has once reached this stage. The warmest of George Eliot's admirers, called upon to swallow some tough morsel of polysyllabic humour in a twentieth-century novel, will refuse to be comforted with parallel passages from Adam Bede. Loyalty may smother the ejaculation that 'George Eliot knew no better': it is none the less clear to him that we know better now. A few well-worn types are illustrated below.
a. Polysyllabic humour.
- He was a boy whom Mrs. Hackit had pronounced stocky (a word that etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an instrument of punishment for the refractory).—ELIOT.
- Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his corduroys.—ELIOT.
- No one save an individual not in a condition to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw ...—Times.
- And an observer of Miss Tox's proceedings might have inferred so much without declaratory confirmation.—DICKENS.
- But it had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be ...