The Rhetorician’s Vade Mecum (17)

Next, fill your quiver with queer mysterious words used once or twice by the ancients, ready to be discharged at a moment’s notice in conversation, This will attract the attention of the common herd, who will take you for a wonder, so much better educated than themselves. Put on your clothes? of course not; invest yourself. Will you sit in the porch, when there is a parvys to hand? No earnest-money for us; let it be an arles-penny. And no breakfast-time, pray, but undern. You may also do a little

word-formation of your own on cecasion, and enact that a person good at exposition shall be known as a clarifier, a sensible one as a cogitant, or a pantomime as a manuactor. If you commit a blunder or provincialism, you have only to carry it off boldly with an instant reference to the authority of some poet or historian, who need not exist or ever have existed; your phrase has his approval, and he was a wise man and a past master in language. As for your reading, leave the ancients alone; never mind a foolish Isocrates, a tasteless Demosthenes, a frigid Plato; study the works of the last generation; you will find the declamations, as they call them, a plenteous store on which to draw at need.