S. P. L. L by S. E. Dowd

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1880

"S. P. L. L."

By S. E. Dowd

"Oh! my goodness gracious!" said pretty Kate Gray, grasping her left forefinger in her right hand, and scowling till she ceased to look like herself.

"What is the matter of thee now, Katherine? Is thy head bursting open again?"

"Grandma Gray, I just think you're a perfectly cruel and hard-hearted woman!" said Kate, dropping into a chair. "I do believe that, if I fell and broke my neck, you wouldn't say you were sorry for me!"

"I don't think my pity would do thee much good under such circumstances. But where is thy 'goodness gracious,' and what does ail thee, child?"

"Why, I've run a horrid great needle through my finger. Mercy to me, how it hurts!"

"Am I some cruel executioner, Katherine, that thee begs for mercy?"

Kate ran out of the room, without answering. She had had many such encounters with her grandmother, and usually got the worse of the argument. It was nearly time for her French teacher, too, and she dashed into the finishing of her exercise, which had somehow been neglected. Luckily, the last word was done before she heard the customary greeting:

"Comment vous portez-vous, Mademoiselle?"

The lesson went on pretty well till it came to the unlucky exercise and then Professor Vaux said, in French:

"That is bad!"

"Oh! murder!" said Kate. "I knew better than that."

"How is it," said the Professor, "that you say achetir, and not vendu, in this place?"

"My conscience! that's a horrid blunder! Horrors! I've written it three times over!" And Kate erased and rewrote her sentences; but again came the dreaded remark:

"Wrong, Mademoiselle."

"Dear me suz!" sighed Kate. "I trully think that French is the most perfectly awful language that ever—" but she did not continue, for the Professor, with a shrug of his square shoulders, leaned back in his chair, looking intensely amused.

"Why are you laughing at me?" demanded Kate, who did not relish jokes very well.

"A thousand pardons! But Mademoiselle is very—so very droll this afternoon."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," said Kate, rather stiffly.

"Excuse me; but it is this. You say so many times such very queer words. You say 'horrors' in your lesson; you say your 'conscience'; you say 'murder' when I correct you: and now you say so droll a thing—you say 'dear me suz!' You make me to laugh. I do not understand how you mean. Have you not interjections in the English?"

"Mercy! yes. Acres of interjections in the grammar. Nobody ever uses them, though, and they are dreadfully tame. Oh! and alas! and such words."

"And Mademoiselle is right if she thinks 'murder' and 'horrors' are wild. Pardon me if I say to you that we have in the French a proverb like this: 'A lady is known when she opens her mouth.' And, with this parting shot, Monsieur Vaux withdrew."

When Leonard Gray came into his mother's parlor, at twilight, he found Kate in the bay window, in her own peculiar attitude for serious thought.

"Well, Puss-Cat-Mew," was his salutation, "what are you settling now?"

"Nothing. I'm reflecting upon the interjection—and other things. I've had two regular broadsides to-day, Len. Grandma nearly took my head off because I was—well, rather, emphatic about hurting my finger fearfully; and Prof. Vaux actually laughed at me! He just the same as said that I wasn't ladylike. I always thought he was a perfect gentleman, until now."

"But I don't think Monsieur Vaux was at all to blame," said Leonard, after Kate had detailed her grievance. "Suppose you were giving Nora a recipe for a cake, and she put in her comments like this. You would begin:

" 'Take one cup of sugar'— " 'Holy Moses!' " 'Three cups of butter'— " 'By jingoes!' " 'Six cups of milk'— " 'Soul and body!' " 'One pint of raisins'— " 'Lord love ye, what a cake!' "

"Dear me, that's just what I think," said Kate, laughing. "But, Len, I don't say 'jingoes,' and 'Holy Moses,' and those things. I never say vulgar things, as Nora does. You know I don't."

"Don't you suppose that 'horrors' and 'murder' sound just as vulgar to Monsieur Vaux or to Judge Hart as Nora's exclamations do to you?"

"Well, I can't help it," said Kate. "I've got to use words, and if I can't use what I like and when I like, I may as well use the mute alphabet and done with it. I can't be horribly proper and say pine, prune, and prism all the time. It's horrid of people to act so to me."

"Nonsense," her brother rejoined. "You're not a steam-engine. Your intellectual machinery wouldn't burst if you didn't pull the interjectional safety-valve quite as often. But cheer up, Puss, we shall see Queen Katherine a lady yet, or I am no prophet." And with a kiss upon Kate's pouting lips, Leonard took up his paper.

A very sober and demure maiden spent the evening at Mr. Gray's. The dainty crochet-hook she was using flashed in and out of the scarlet hood as if it had a will of its own; but her tongue was so silent that her father thought she must be sick. She was as gay as ever the next morning. She danced down to breakfast, overtook her little grandma, picked her up and put her in the arm-chair, set the other chairs up to the table in a twinkling, and cried out to Nora, as she came in:

"Nora, your coffee smells perfectly gorgeous this morning."

"Yes," said Leonard, "it's almost as gorgeous as a butterfly's wing."

Snub Number One, thought Kate. Believe I'll keep count to-day. "Here, Grandma, you must have one of these waffles. They're simply magnificent!"

"That's about what I should say of the Cathedral of Milan," began Mr. Gray; when Kate interrupted him with:

"Oh! Papa, please don't make my life a burden to me."

The next day was Sunday, and Kate went to her class, as usual.

"Isn't it queer that this lesson, 'The Tongue and the Temper,' comes to-day?" she said to herself, and she entered very heartily into the discussion of it.

"I sometimes think," she said, gravely, "that we should be better off if we couldn't speak. Anyhow, 'It's puzzlin' work, talkin' is,' as Mrs. Tulliver remarked. I know I shouldn't have many vexations if it were not for my tongue. It aggravates my temper horribly."

Miss Kent said it was no wonder the tongue was called the unruly member; but she should be very sorry if the tongue could not be governed. After a few words upon profane swearing, she passed on to the more common ways that people take to secure sufficient emphasis to their statements, using just such expressions as were in vogue among her girls.

"Why, Miss Kent," said one, "do you call such words wrong?"

"Here are Christ's own words," she replied: "'But let your communication be, Yea, yea; nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.'"

"It's dreadfully hard to be so very precise," said Lily Sylvester, with a sigh.

"Yes, bad habits are not easily overcome; but, if there were no words like these, it seems to me that no real lady would use questionable language. A rough expression is like a discord in music to people of culture. We judge of a lady by her speech, and no amount of fine dressing can cover up a coarse or vulgar phrase."

"No, indeed," said May Selden, "when I was going to New York last spring, there was such a lovely lady on the cars, dressed so beautifully! I couldn't keep from looking at her. Papa sat with his back to her, and, when I wanted him just to turn around carelessly and look at her, he laughed and made me take his chair. Do you know, Miss Kent, she hardly said a sentence without putting 'I vum,' or 'I swan,' or some such thing in it. She was perfectly horrid to me after that."

"You understand, then, how people feel about the words you use, and why your friends wish you to speak correctly, truthfully, and elegantly."

"Truthfully!" echoed Kate. "Do you think we don't tell the truth?"

"Do you never get perfectly ravenous or completely exhausted? Are you never dead with the heat? Do you never study yourself blind?"

"I'm sure, people know what we mean," said Lily.

"But I wonder we do not say what we mean," remarked the teacher, with a smile.

"Mamma says I'm in the effervescent state," said May; "and she hopes the froth is almost gone."

"Please tell us, Miss Kent, if your tongue was ever unruly?" asked Kate, who was very grave indeed.

"Very unruly. And I had several severe mortifications before I set about a thorough reformation of my speech."

Our friend Kate wore a very preoccupied look for several days after this. She made frequent use of a certain little note-book; she pored over Latin, French, and German grammars. When her researches ended, she called a meeting of her particular friends, and the secret came out.

"Young ladies, my most illustrious fellow-sufferers," began the gay little orator, "I'll tell you what I've made up my mind to. I'm going to govern my tongue, instead of allowing it to govern me. I'm going to stop using slang. I'm going to mean just exactly what I say. I'm going to use simple, correct, truthful language, if I can. And it's going to be awful (I mean very) hard to do it, unless you girls will help. Now, can't we form a Society for the Promotion of Ladylike Language, with initiations, and offices, and fines, and all that? I've a long list of perfectly harmless and proper interjections—French, German, and Latin—that we can use when our feelings are 'too many for us,' as Mrs. Cluppins would say. I'll hektograph them for you, if you'll do it; and all the rules and regulations, too, if you'll only help."

"Did you say you would never use slang?" asked Ida.

"'What, never?' and 'hardly ever'—must we exist without that?" said May.

"I'm sure, I've heard enough of 'Pinafore,'" said Kate.

"And must I part with all my pet words—that I made on Barbara Holabird's plan? Some of them were too expressive!"

"Then it's time you drop them," laughed Kate.

And so, with much jesting, but with a deal more of earnest talk, the S. P. L. L. was formed, with a constitution, by-laws, and all of the usual formalities; but it is a very secret society, and, had I not given ear to a little bird, how should I have known why those nine girls wear such queerly-shaped bows of flame-colored ribbon, bearing the cabalistic letters "S. P. L. L."?—S. E. Dowd, in Independent.