Correct Speech | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 30, 1879

Correct Speech.

NOTHING bespeaks a true lady and gentleman or well bred child more than the use of correct language, pure, clean speech. Cultivate, my young friends, good English in everyday conversation. Unclean speech is in keeping with a smutty face, begrimed hands, and soiled clothes. Strange how easy and almost unconsciously one slides into a careless slipshod way of talking, even when the rules of Grammar are quite familiar. It is not uncommon to find people learned in all the rules of syntax who apply them to the art of writing, yet habitually talking incorrectly.

Early culture and association with refined persons are quite essential to give purity to speech; but if one has been unfortunately deprived of these he should continually watch his words till he gets in the habit of using decent English, for nothing so unmistakably marks one with vulgarity, no matter how elegant is the outside covering, as shabby low-born speech.

Not long since the folks belonging to several families in a certain neighborhood, who had frequent intercourse with each other, entered into an agreement to pay a small forfeit every time either of them made use of certain vulgarisms in speech that had become a habit with them. Old and young, large and small, soon became interested and entered into the compact. All had fallen into the habit, for false syntax is contagious, and spreads through whole communities when it once breaks out, and one of its worst phases is that people are affected by it without knowing it.—Ex.