Chapter 5

Special Gifts, Devices and Techniques

The best all-around recipe for becoming a good conversationalist is simply learning much, experiencing much, thinking deeply and wisely. But just as all these need voice and rhetoric to express them acceptably, so a really superior conversationalist has certain other resources and talents at his disposal. These are needed to lift a conversationalist from good to superior, to promote him from a "B" to an "A."

Of all, the one I most fear and envy is the gift of mimicry. I envy it because I possess none of it. I cannot even imitate Amos or Andy. I keenly regret that no one at home ever encouraged me to try it. And the reason why we were not encouraged is probably the very same reason that causes me to fear it. Mimicry is the easiest and surest way to be funny; but it is also the quickest way to hurt and belittle. Mimicking a Yiddish accent or a Pennsylvania Dutch accent is irresistibly funny, but it may not be so funny to the person or peoples mimicked. Mimicking, like cartooning, feeds upon peculiarities and magnifies them. Peculiarities are seldom things their possessors are proud of. A bald head is funny to the other fellow, but not to the owner. The play Cyrano de Bergerac is constructed around the fun the funmakers had with Cyrano's long nose and his sensitivenes on that point.

A gifted mimic's temptations to cause laughter at the expense of the other are besetting. If he is not an absolutely kindly, generous person he is sure to abuse his power. Nevertheless the gift of mimicry is one of the most valuable assets a conversationalist can have. Its power is not confined to belittling; it can also be used to imply a compliment. One may, for example, mimic someone who talks very dramatically — and so in effect compliment him. One may mimic a person who, longing for it yet fearing it, declines the third cocktail — the mimicking will produce laughter but not hurtful laughter. A light touch of mimicry is nearly always suitable in quoting anyone or in reproducing the various speakers of an anecdote. Mimicry, after all, is a phase of acting — and acting is one of the greatest of human arts. If I were a parent I would, with due warning against misuse, encourage my children to acquire the art. I advise anyone who has even an ounce of talent for it to improve himself in it.

Allied to mimicry is raillery, or teasing. While sarcasm and serious irony may be said not to belong to conversation at all, raillery, teasing, "kidding" are indispensable parts of good conversation. The whole world remembers Goldsmith's saying to Johnson that if he tried to make fishes talk his goldfish would talk like whales. Though this clinched the point against Johnson, there was an implied compliment in it. "Raillery," says Jonathan Swift, "is the finest part of conversation." Then he goes on to complain that raillery is not merely "repartee, or being smart." He explains:

It now passes for raillery to run a man down in discourse, to put him out of countenance, and make him ridiculous; sometime to expose the defects of his person or understanding; on all which occasions, he is obliged not to be angry, to avoid the imputation of not being able to take a jest. It is admirable to observe one who is dexterous at this art, singling out a weak adversary, getting the laugh on his side, and then carrying all before him.

Who has not observed this sort of thing! Among refined grownups there may be little of it. But in schools and factories, the amount of conversational bullying is vast.

Not until the last judgment will there be an estimate of the enormous amount of pang and agony, mostly silent, that is piled up on the world by careless, unkind teasing, teasing against the ones who are precisely least able to meet it. I beg you with all earnestness not to offend on this score. As a preliminary precaution, you ought to make it a cast-iron rule not to tease any person whom you in any way dislike or who may imagine himself to be disliked. If you really like a person, then any teasing is likely to end with the edge taken off — if not by the words, then by the tone. But if deep in your heart you do not like a person, then almost any teasing is likely to end with the edge imbedded — either by the words, or the tone. In any circle you should direct your shafts at those who most certainly know that you like them. You should side with those with whom friendship needs further cementing against those who are known, as Shakespeare would say, to be grappled to our souls "with hoops of steel." If a husband and wife get along well and are thought to get along well, then they may well direct some of the teasing against each other. They should very rarely gang up together against another — unless he is known to all to be their best mutual friend, such as the best man at the wedding, or the like. As a teacher, I sometimes tease the students collectively and individually. But I make it a point never to tease a class if I have just had difficulty with it about grades, or any individual student whom I cannot bring myself deep down in my heart to like much, or with whom, even though I like him, there has been any sort of friction — over grades, assignment, or behavior. This, I believe, is a rule one should apply to all raillery.

One should absolutely never tease except from a kindly and friendly heart. And the correct technique of teasing is that underneath the discomfiture we seem to be administering, there be a sort of implied compliment. Swift for all time laid down the correct technique of the matter. Properly executed, raillery is "to say something that at first appears a reproach or reflection, but by some turn of wit, unexpected and surprising, ends always in a compliment." Once the King met Dr. Johnson and reproached him for not having written anything lately. As the great lexicographer struggled to bear up against the reproach, the King said that he should not mind his having written nothing lately, if he had not formerly written so well. This in general ought to be the spirit of raillery. You say, "I am so sorry you were wearing your new hat the other day as you strolled through the square." Then as the wearer and others begin to think that perhaps you did not like her hat, you add, "It made it absolutely impossible for me to get a glimpse of your eyes." You say, "I am not on friendly terms with my mother just now. Yesterday, no matter how I begged her she refused me a second piece of her delicious pumpkin pie. When I came home a few hours later, what do I see, but a beggar sitting on the back steps eating that piece of pie." You say, "Have you noticed how Susan is eating lately — adding pounds and curves by leaps and bounds. Why, it is getting so one can't dance with her any more — without having three fellows rush up to cut in."

That sort of teasing or raillery is the best condiment that can be added to conversation. It may be impersonally about a class, as well as a person. You can say, "These Quakers are a fearfully contrary people. They refuse to fight, they refuse to swear, they practically never talk — and when they do it is to say something good about someone." You say, "Missionaries are an ungrateful and irresponsible lot. They come around giving you a hard-luck story, you are moved, you give them half your wardrobe — and the next thing you find they have wasted your good clothes on a lot of heathen Chinese."

This is the sort of teasing a conversationalist should indulge in a lot. But if he cannot give his raillery a kindly twist he should avoid it. I would especially caution young people against caustic teasing. And I would tell parents and teachers to keep warning their youngsters not to tease harshly, hurtfully, unkindly. Boys have sometimes been called the cruelest young barbarians in the world. They are not only savage in their humor, they are also bullies — in that they keep directing it at the weakest, the most defenseless. It is written of the gentle English poet, William Cowper:

At six he was sent away to a boy's school, where he was terrified by young barbarians who made his life miserable. There was one atrocious bully into whose face Cowper could never look; he recognized his enemy by his shoe buckles (Wm. J. Long, History of English Literature [Ginn and Co., 1919], P-

Of another poet, Shelley, who later wrote the significant sentence, "the savage is to ages what the child is to years," it is similarly written:

... he suffered torments at the hands of his rough schoolfellows . . . they chivied him like dogs around a little coon that fights and cries defiance to the end (Long, op. cit., p. 413).

Charles Lamb in "Poor Relations" tells of an Oxford scholar who so feared the teasing of his fellows when they learned that his father was not in the professions, but only a humble house painter, that he left school and home both.

Truly, teasing, when not inspired by a wise and kind heart, is a fearful instrument.

Young men and women approaching the courting age indulge in an unbelievable amount of painful banter. It is as if Beelzebub inspired their teasing. When a new hat means so much to a girl, a boy will manifest his cleverness by saying, "Look at the gargoyle she acquired — they must have seen her coming." Many a coat or a dress, which cost a girl's father much hard-earned money, has been forever soured for a girl because of the thoughtless uncomplimentary teasing of some young conversational galoot. Having noticed it again and again, and most bitterly regretted some guilt of it in myself, I am sometimes inclined to explain this fearful plague in young people's talk as a sort of God-permitted prophylactic against their falling too violently and multiplicably in love with one another. As it is, their nature and impulses keep drawing them together, but their uncivil tongues, their  "razzing” and teasing, keep them apart.

But, surely, it is a low commentary on humanity, if it can control its passion only by wounding one another's feelings. I would have every young man and woman reading this book resolve absolutely never to tease anyone in a spirit of unkindness. I urge them never to comment critically, never to tease people upon their looks, their figure, their clothes, their parents, their class, or their neighborhood. Even unkindly teasing of one's home town can hurt bitterly when one is young. Boys should not "razz" other boys upon those things, but above all, no boy should tease girls about any of them. A boy who does so is a boor. Parents, teachers, pastors ought to keep stressing the importance of charity in all teasing.

The only type of critical teasing that has a function and should not be entirely forbidden is that directed against correctable faults in one's associates. Young people are not supposed to be civilized, they are supposed to become so. Consequently, going to school is not merely a matter of learning, but of evolving from impulses to discipline. If a boy cannot accept an umpire's rulings, it is quite proper that he should be teased about it until he does. If a girl wears clearly and certainly immodest clothes and over-paints her face, she may well be teased into more propriety. If a boy tends to be "fresh" toward girls, or mawkish, a good dose of teasing may and should correct him. That sort of critical teasing is a valuable device for bringing young people into line — into the manner and mores of the community. It is not the same thing as teasing or "razzing" people upon factors over which they have no control or which are not a matter of character. However, even such corrective teasing ought to be imbued with St. Paul's rich charity. Usually better than teasing is to call an offender aside and in a kindly way point out to him his irregularity of behavior or manner. But such wisdom, I have found, cannot be expected from many young people. "Razzing" will probably continue as the most powerful device for pinpricking people out of their unsocial peculiarities. I am accepting it that way, however regretfully.

Since raillery is such a two-edged tool of conversation, it seems to me a person ought to be trained to meet its unkind and unjust forms. If it is directed against others, he will naturally side with the one who is being teased, and direct some of the shafts against the bully. If you do this, you may often reap the eternal gratitude of the victim. In defending anyone you must be careful, however, not to apologize for him, and so, in a way, make the bully's charges stick all the more. Anyone who says, "Don't pick on John for his bad grammar. He can't help it if his parents came from the old country," hurts John much more than the teaser hurt him. But if you say, "Isn't it wonderful to be as perfect as Tom — to have perfect accent and diction — so that one can tease others about theirs. I bet Tom uses a dictionary for a pillow," then you are helping John. You direct attention away from him, which is what he most yearns for, and you do not by your apology underline the charges the teaser has made.

If you yourself are the butt of hurtful teasing, I know no surer way for turning away the "razz" than the soft answer. Honest humility truly seems to me the most powerful solvent of ill will, the best answer to most of the reproaches of our fellow men. If you cannot turn the tables on the teaser, if you are not witty enough, or if the subject is too delicate, then use the I-give-up approach. If you are teased for growing bald and it hurts you, simply say, "Yes, every time I look in the mirror I see the hairline receding — and believe me, it does not feel good. I don't blame you for wanting to tease me. I know my baldness looks terrible." This, I maintain, will soon stop the teasing.

Oh, that one learned that trick early in life! One fall, I wore a handed-down suit in school. Its descent was noticeable. One fellow, not really evil at heart, for he is a priest today, caused me an unbelievable amount of shame and suffering by frequently saying, "What material, eh. Will never wear out. Grandfather wore it, father wore it, and it is still as good as new." It crushed me every time. It hurt me so much that I could never manage a "comeback." Yet had I just once said to him: "You are right, Joe. It is, of course, handed down — and I suppose looks a bit peculiar. But we are a large family, and I don't like to hint to my parents that I mind," I am sure such an answer would have checked his teasing, not only on that point, but on similar ones. I am deeply convinced that the best approach to painful teasing is to make a clean breast of the true, even if unjust, part of it, very humbly — and not resentfully. A man who learns to admit a charge, instead of fighting it, has a great technique for self-protection — and for developing friends who will rise to defend him.

The I-give-up approach is perhaps the only way to meet and check teasing on points which are unbearably distasteful or painful to us. But that method also cuts the conversation short on that point. If we did that on all points, we would become conversational wallflowers. A really good, sociable person is one who has reduced the number of things upon which he is too touchy to be teased, who has learned to be philosophical about his shortcomings and peculiarities so that he can gracefully accept teasing. The baldhead who invites teasing about it is much more popular than a towhead who doesn't. A person must try to overcome his sensitiveness. He might make a list of things about which he is touchy now, and resolve in the next year to reduce the number. From a great many, I now have only two. I hope to get over these too — it seems impossible, but only a few years ago there were an additional three I thought I never could overcome.

If you want to be a welcome conversationalist, it is better to be a person who invites teasing and reacts gracefully to it, than to be the teaser. It is said of Lincoln that while he "liked to tell a joke on others, he also had the rare faculty of being able to appreciate one on himself" (Abraham Lincoln, ed. Edward Wagenknecht [New York: Creative Press, 1947], p. 575). This "rare faculty" is one a good conversationalist positively must strive for. The way to react to teasing and so to stimulate the conversation wittily is to twist the shaft directed against one into a sort of compliment, no matter how farfetched. A bald person can retort, "Why, my long hard thinking is beginning to show. I notice it doesn't show on you!" This will be fun for everyone, promote the talk. A freckled person might retort with mock meekness, "Yes, I suffer from a curious affinity with the sun — forces me to reflect sunlight all about — even on those unworthy of it." A color-blind person can say, "Just think how much pain I am spared when I have to look at your neckties. And how much pain I can give you with mine — and that with no malice aforethought!" A fat girl might say, "Just think how much more the fellow who marries me will get for his money." If I had not been so sensitive about my handed-down suit, and had answered, "Can I help it if my family goes way back and I have to sit on its patches?" a stream of most probably highly good-natured banter would have been provoked.

Yes, it is more blessed to be twitted than to twit — and the way to do it is deftly to catch the shaft, pretend to lean on it as if it were a staff, and suddenly to lob it back. That makes everybody feel good. Even if the teaser does not have St. Paul's charity, he will be converted to the good spirit of it. If a young barbarian should tease a cripple, and the latter should smilingly say: "I don't know why it is that when God is fond of anyone he makes them lame. You remember how He wrestled with Jacob and lamed him. Guess He does it so we can't escape him. But don't let that worry you, Tom. I don't think you'll be lame for a good while to come," I think the prick would neatly have been converted into a clasp — a banter for friendship.

Wit and humor are obvious desiderata in a conversationalist. If anyone could set down a sure-fire prescription for being witty he would be more popular than Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It cannot be done. The best a writer can do is to make people at least try to get a bit of wit into their conversation, offer a few helpful hints, and let it go at that. Humor comes from the unexpected, from the surprise viewpoint. A woman visiting the zoo asks if the hippopotamus is male or female. If the keeper, taking an unexpected viewpoint, answers, "That is a matter that should be of interest only to another hippopotamus," surely there is humor. Someone asks the shortest way from here to Tweak City, and the other answers, "A straight line." One asks, "How long should the period of courtship be," and the other answers, "It should be a point at the end of the aisle." Things like that, taking the viewpoint no one expects, are the best device for humor. Less desirable but sometimes effective is exaggeration. "The town is so small that turning around once you see it twice." "That fellow was so slow, molasses in January waved back at him." Once I heard a stenographer say: "I am so low today I could sit on a cigarette paper and swing my feet." A much maligned form of humor is the pun. Often called the lowest form of wit, it has its place. Virtually every great conversationalist has had to plead guilty to its use. The habitual punster is, however, a plague on good conversation. The reason is that he will quip his puns in the middle of someone's paragraph. You are explaining that lying is a certain sin. The punster rejoins, "That is what my mother seems to think when she calls me to get up every morning." Thus the significant topic is sidetracked by this inopportune pun. An irrelevant pun almost deserves the remark attributed to Dr. Johnson, that "He who would make a pun would pick a pocket." A pun brings incongruously together two different meanings of words sounding alike. A good pun can be really funny. And if it comes as an interlude between two speakers, that is at the conclusion of someone's point, it is quite acceptable. Someone asked the late W. C. Fields, "Do you believe in clubs for women?" He is supposed to have replied, "Yes, if every other form of persuasion fails." Someone remarks that a professor who comes to class ten minutes late is very rare. The punster amends, "I suppose, you would say he's in a class by himself, wouldn't you?" This sort of thing is fine. If you have the gift for it, judiciously inflict it on your party.

Few people are witty or humorous enough to do much extempore inventing of wit. Most people who want to contribute their share of humor to a conversation have to rely on jokes and anecdotes they learned from a joke book or the "Laugh" page of the magazine. I think one can say that a person with pretensions to superior conversation ought to be able to tell a joke well. He ought to have a repertoire of old ones and a weather eye out for new ones. Jonathan Swift wrote: "There are some men excellent at telling a story, and provided with a plentiful stock of them . . . considering how low conversation runs now among us, it is not altogether a contemptible talent." Dr. Henry C. Link has found that knowing and telling jokes and stories are marks of a relatively high personality quotient.

I would say that anyone who wants to be considered a good conversationalist ought to make it a point to know some fifty to a hundred stories and anecdotes to tell when the circumstances are fitting. People thirst for humor. You owe it to them to make some little contribution. That means you tell a story to please them, not yourself. You should therefore make sure you can tell it right, and have not told it to the same group before. You should also keep adding new ones to your stock.

Swift warns that:

Storytelling is subject to two unavoidable defects, frequent repetition, and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company, that he may not discover the weakness of his fund.

Rather than shift his company, a storyteller ought to keep shifting his stories.

Telling a joke or anecdote well is an art. They say of Lincoln that he

. . . was a master of the storytelling art; and when told by a master, even a dull joke may be irresistible. . . . [Lincoln's] countenance and all his features seemed to take part in the performance. As he neared the pith or point of the joke or story, every vestige of seriousness disappeared from his face. His little gray eyes sparkled ... his frame quivered with suppressed excitement (see Abraham Lincoln, ed. Edward Wagen-knecht, 1947, p. 566).

The time to learn to tell jokes is at home in the family. If a person has to learn later among friends, he ought to beg their indulgence during the first few trials by saying with a smile, "The other day I read a good story on this matter we are discussing. With your permission I'll take a chance on telling it," and then try it. If it fails, he ought to laugh and say good-naturedly, "Well, I guess I did not get it across." Later he should try again. By and by will come confidence and some success. While there isn't space here for detailed instructions on how to tell an anecdote, yet do I want to impress two rules as imperative. First, never try to tell a joke unless you have the climax, the point of it, well and clear in mind; secondly, get over the preliminaries quickly but slow up as you reach the climax. Possibly even pause a bit before the crucial word, and then say it with a clarity and force which cannot be muffed. Our previous rules for effective pitch and tempo are never needed more than in anecdotage.

Unless a person has an uncommonly happy gift for storytelling, it is better to tell only pertinent anecdotes, when they arise out of the topic and illustrate it. Stories told that way, even if not particularly witty or clever, are nearly always welcome. It is said of Lincoln that his wit was used most frequently as an aid to clarify meaning. It is most desirable to have a range of anecdotes and stories fitting various topics. Easiest to tell and most welcome are those concerning well-known personages. Supposing the topic is, how hard it is to be honest and tactful at the same time. Here everybody would appreciate your saying at this point:

It seems one day Bernard Shaw faced this situation when Galsworthy had said to him something like this: "Mr. Shaw, if you keep writing the way you do, you will soon not have a friend in the world." To which challenge G. B. S. gallantly responded, "And, Mr. Galsworthy, if you keep writing the way you do, you will never make an enemy all your life."

This sort of anecdote, because it bears on the topic, is appreciated by people, even if they do not find it especially funny. If you tell stories that explain or illustrate the subject, you cannot easily go wrong. Even a story heard from you before is acceptable when it is used to bear upon a new situation.

It is when stories are told for their own sake, for the specific purpose of producing a laugh, that problems and dangers arise. If I have to choose between no jokes and jokes irrelevantly or irresponsibly breaking in on a serious conversation, I prefer no jokes. Jokes like that are a conversational nuisance. Almost as bad is a whole evening of jokes. It was probably such an evening that provoked a Saturday Evening Post "Postscripter" to write that the guest he had most enjoyed,

When the party was over and done

Was the fellow who knew a hundred jokes,
But couldn't remember one.
(Philip Lazarus, Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 24, 1945)
Jokes should be the pepper of conversation, not masquerade as the main dish. Furthermore I can force myself to laugh at an occasional dull joke, but in a whole evening of storytelling there are likely to be so many inept ones that my risibility cannot keep up to its duty. A half hour of joke telling is about the maximum.

While one danger is that jokes become a conversational nuisance by their irrelevancy, the greater danger is that as soon as storytelling becomes the main business, a lively tug of war seems to begin between the parlor joke and the water-front joke, and the whole party is in suspense whether at the end the parlor joke will still be out in front. There is the fearful expectation that at any moment a dirty joke will explode among them, with everybody's civilized nature pulling for the parlor, but their animal nature ogling at the bowery.

One can say that in America today, when a group of miscellaneous men are on humor bent, it takes no more than about the fifth joke to send them careening to the swamps. Sometimes I think it futile to talk about good grammar, good rhetoric, to warn against slang, when somehow the talk of most men — from soldiers to collegians, from bankers to stevedores — as soon as women are not within earshot, is a continuous sprinkling, if not a stream, of words and jokes too vile to put in print. It appears to me that priests and ministers do not fully realize this plague, for they seldom preach realistically against it. During months in the army I did not hear a single sermon against profanity and obscenity. Likewise, mothers, wives, and sweethearts seem to have no realization of the enormous output of degrading filth their menfolks, certainly most of them, spout forth. Generally speaking, all men who do not occasionally complain against this evil, participate in it. All talk about improving American conversation is half beside the point until this smudge is repressed.

It is, perhaps, distressing that God should have so constructed human beings physically that their elimination and sexual functions are as they are, and so psychologically that they are perpetually preoccupied with them. He may have wanted to make this one of the special moral hurdles man had to overcome to reach heaven. He set man's stream of consciousness in a bed half of purifying sand, half of degrading mud and rocks, and in the end man goes to heaven or hell according to whether he has kept the stream more upon the sand or more upon the mud. Usually the mud seems to be winning. Most foul language is probably not gravely wrong. Yet it is difficult to imagine a band of foulmouthed fellows singing the praises of God in heaven. It is hard to imagine God wanting to be surrounded by the likes of them. But it is certain that foul language and dirty jokes are totally unacceptable in good conversation.

Not only must a good conversationalist avoid these himself, but he must not tolerate them in his company. His attitude ought to be that of the fellow who, when someone suggestively asked preparatory to his story, "Are there any ladies present?" answered, "No, there are not, but there are some gentlemen present." Samuel Johnson, asked why he often was so brusque, said that he found that the best way to squelch motions toward indecency in speech.

I would beg the reader of this book, if a man, to make his standard that of fitness for his mother's ears, as brought out in the following anecdote, and if a woman, to hold her menfolks to this same standard. Joe E. Brown, according to his book, Your Kids and Mine,1 after entertaining in New Guinea with stories and jokes finally said, " 'That's all I know.' " Then there was "a little slit of silence and way back on the edge of the crowd a youngster shouted, 'Hey, Joe, tell us some dirty stories.' " Joe E. Brown continues:

You could have heard a pin drop. The kids looked at me. I stood there a minute and then I just forgot I was a comedian and told them just what I'd have said to my own son:

"Listen, you kids, I've been on the stage since I was 10. I've told all kinds of jokes to all kinds of people, but I'm proud that in all that time I've never had to stoop to a dirty story to get a laugh. I know some dirty stories, kids. I've heard plenty of 'em in my life, but I made a rule a long time ago that I'd never tell a story that I wouldn't want my mother to hear me telling."

If that has not been the motto of the reader of this book, I hope he will resolve upon it this minute. Anyone who does not live up to it is so much wastage in a world that might be beautiful. The poet Shelley, even though not strong enough to obey the Sixth Commandment, had enough sense of beauty to say devastatingly:

Obscenity ... is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life. ... It is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food which it devours in secret.2

1 Doubleday and Co., Inc., New York, 1944. Quoted from a condensed chapter, "What GI's Laugh At," in The Catholic Digest, June, 1945, p. 50.

2 "Defense of Poetry," in Criticism, ed. by Schorer, Miles, McKenzie (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948), p. 461.

A good conversationalist is a clean one. And in a theoretically difficult matter the simplest way for a person to know whether he is a clean one is to ask himself whether his usual conversation is the kind his mother might well and unblushingly overhear.

But a good conversationalist is not merely a negative extinguisher of others' dirty fun — he gives them something better in its place. He knows a few stories himself, a few clean ones, and he shows them ever and again that a clean story can be just as funny as a dirty one — and a whole lot more satisfying. When others start telling dirty ones he tactfully leads the conversation away from them. If that does not work, he tells them courteously the Joe E. Brown story above and adds that he assumes they all really want to live up to that standard. If even that does not work, then he politely takes his leave. As St. Paul says: "Go out from among them, saith the Lord, and be ye separate and touch not the unclean thing" (2 Cor. 6:17). If you are in the majority, then, as St. Paul says of certain sinners, including those "bitter of speech," "banish the offender from your company" (1 Cor. 5:13). But blessed the person who so leavens a conversation with his own clean fun, facts, and anecdotes that by mere force of example it will be on a high level, with a maximum of St. Paul's "edge of liveliness."

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