the American "buffer" (on a railway carriage) I do not feel my blood
boil. A very slight elevation of the eyebrows expresses all the emotion
of which I am conscious. So long as he does not insist on my saying a
"bumper state" when I mean a "buffer state," I see no reason whatever
for any rupture of that sympathy which ought to subsist between two men
who take a common interest and pride in the subject of his
treatise--_Our Common Speech_.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote Q: See _English Past and Present_, ninth edition, pp. 63,
215.]

[Footnote R: "What great city of this country," Mr. Tucker inquires,
"has developed, or is likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors at
all comparable in importance to those of the Cockney speech of London?"
The answer is pat: New York and Chicago--unless Mr. Townsend's _Chimmie
Fadden_ and Mr. Ade's _Artie_ are sheer linguistic libels.]

[Footnote S: It must be very painful to Mr. Tucker to find Shakespeare
talking of the "two hours' traffic of our stage." He was a hardened
offender, was Shakespeare, against Mr. Tucker's ideal of one single,
inelastic, cast-iron signification for every word in the language.]




II