While going through some family memorabilia that I inherited, I discovered an address book that my grandfather had dated 1923. In it, he had typed several creative compositions, which I suppose he had read someplace and wanted to preserve for future reference. They are reproduced below, to provide a glimpse of American bachelorhood from 80 years ago.
—
Don’t use big words.
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or in articulating superficial sentimentalities and philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compact comprehensiveness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibilty and veracious vivacity without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllable profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent rapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant and apparent. In other words, talk plainly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully and purely.
—
A Midnight Game
The football game was over,
And before the parlor grate,
A maiden and a man
Were lingering rather late.
They talked of punts and passes,
Things which are rather tame,
Til cupid put his nose guard on
And butted in the game.
He lined that couple up;
Then made them toe the mark,
And soon had them going,
With a scrimmage in the dark.
As they sat there silent,
In this new formed bliss;
The man thought that the scrimmage
Ought to end up with a kiss.
Thereupon he tried one,
An amateur affair,
But he lost it on a fumble
And instead it hit the air.
The next he landed on her ear
And then the maid did shyly say,
“You’re penalized for holding and
Likewise for off-side play.”
Fiercely he tried another;
This time succeeding fine,
For he made a bully touchdown,
On that warm red two yard line.
As they sat there in the silence,
Communing soul to soul,
The parlor door swung open
And father kicked for goal.
—
A Bachelor’s Prayer
“Backward, turn backward, O
Time in your flight!
Give us a maiden with skirts not
So tight;
Give us a girl whose charms,
many or few,
And not so exposed by much peek-
a-boo.
“Give us a maiden, no matter
what age
Who won’t use the street for a
vaudeville stage;
Give us a girl not so sharply
in view;
Dress her in skirts that the sun
won’t shine through.
“Then give us the dances of
days long gone by,
With plenty of clothes and
steps not so high;
Oust the turkey-trot capers and
buttermilk glides,
The hurdy-gurdy twist and the
wiggle tail slide.
“Then let us feast our tired
optics once more
On a genuine woman as sweet as
of yore;
Yes, time, please turn backward
and grant our request,
For God’s richest blessing
–but not one undressed.”
Print this post [1]
[2]