rds that it
was a mere rhetorical flourish.

Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called
by-words. I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in
which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often
ends in bald profanity. It is, "I declare!" "My stars!" "Mercy on me!"
"Good gracious!" "By George!" "By Jove!" and "By heavens!" and no harm
is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of
talk to that which is positively obnoxious. The English language is
magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and
every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take
to ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers
to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your
exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in
his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and
irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or
hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition,
and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a
hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime
has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their
forked tongues,--words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored,
Anglo-Saxon,--in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and
Shakespeare wrote.

But whatever be the source of this habit, it is on the increase. At
sixteen, boys swear with as much facility as the grandfather did at
sixty. Our streets are cursed by it from end to end. Our hotels, from
morning until midnight, resound with it. Men curse on the way to the
bar to get their morning dram; curse the news-boy who cries the paper;
curse the breakfast for being cold; curse at the bank, and curse at
the store; curse on the way to bed; curse at the stone against which
they strike their foot; and curse at the splinter that gets under the
nail. If you do not know that this is so, it is because your ear has
been hardened by the perpetual din of profanities that are enough to
bring down upon any city the hurricane of fire that consumed Sodom.

The habit is creeping up into the higher circles. Every woman despises
flat and unvarnished imprecations; but in the most elevated circles
there are women who swear without knowing it. They have read Bulwer,
and George Sand, and the exaggerated style of some of our imported as