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.

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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.…