The Mistaken Critic, or a Discourse on the Word (15-16)

I should have named those who have employed the word before our time, were I not certain to disturb you in this way also, by reciting names of poets and rhetoricians and historians that would be foreign to you, and beyond your ken. No, I shall not name those who have used it, for they are known to all; but do you point me out one of the ancients who has not employed the word and your statue shall be set up, as the saying goes, in gold at Olympia. Indeed, any old man, full of years, who is unacquainted with such expressions is not, I think, even aware that the city of Athens is in Attica, Corinth at the Isthmus, and Sparta in the Peloponnese.

It remains, perhaps, for you to say that you knew the word, but criticised the inappropriate use of it. Come now, on this point too I shall respond to you fittingly, and you must pay attention, unless not knowing matters very little to you. The ancients were before me in hurling many such taunts at the like of you, each at the men of their day; for in that time too there were, of course, dirty fellows, disgusting traits, and ungentle dispositions. One man called a certain person “Buskin,” comparing his principles, which were adaptable, to that kind of footwear; another called a man “Rampage” because he was a turbulent orator and disturbed the assembly, and another someone else “Seventh Day” because he acted in the assemblies as children do on the