Baltimore Evening Sun (25 November 1911): 6.

Only 1,270 days more! Well, well, it might be worse!

A corncob pipe to anyone who will offer one sound excuse for the City Council’s existence.

Contributions toward a complete lexicon of journalese:

Secure, v., the osseocapital reporter’s synonym for all verbs of possession, for instance: get, procure, obtain, receive, buy, steal, graft, find, grab, hook, commandeer and enlist. Genial, a., a term of endearment applied to station-house clerks who permit reporters to pry into their books, to hotel clerks who give new tips, and to honorary bartenders at oyster roasts. Mister, n., a term of honor and congratulation, indicating that the man to whom it is applied has not yet been found guilty.

Discoursing yesterday upon the Hon. Thomas G. Boggs and his ridiculous effort to prove that the death rate in Baltimore is less than 18 per 1,000 of population per annum, I ran out of space before I could reveal the whole sad story of hiss gross and naughty juggling of figures. Let me cite two examples and be done.

1. In his latest attack on me says that his original contention was that the death rate in Baltimore “runs from 16 to 18 per 1,000 of population.” His actual words were: “The present mortality rate is 16 per 1,000 of population per annum.” No mention of “to 18.”

2. In that same philippic he says that the death rate during September last was “less than 15.” On the very same page Dr. James Bosley, Commissioner of Health, shows that it was 15.96.

Has the Hon. Mr. Boggs any explanation to offer? If so, I shall be glad to receive it and print it. And, meanwhile, I renew my offer to give him a box of genuine French sardines whenever he publicly proves, by figures not palpably manufactured for the occasion, that the annual death rate in Baltimore, since the year 1750, has ever been less than 18 per 1,000 of population per annum. Furthermore, and in addition to the sardines I offer to five him a lock of my hair. Furthermore, and in addition to the hair, I offer to keep the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association supplied with funeral crape for the period of one calendar week next following the date of the proving—a generous, not to say a rash, offer for a penurious literary gentleman to make.

I do not blame the Hon. Mr. Boggs. He is a victim of his environment and his profession. The day’s work of a boomer, if honestly done, must produce inevitably an atrophy of that faculty which distinguishes between a pleasant fact and a pleasant fiction. A man who attends, week after week, the meetings of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association’s innumerable committees and listens to the speeches, and looks into the transfigured faces of the prophets and spellbinders—that man must eveutually lose completely his grip upon reality. Sky-hooting incessantly through the interstellar spaces of boomery, breathing the rarefied air, wooed by the insidious wind music, scenting the perfume of the transcendestal asphodel, he must needs confuse, in the end, bark and bite, promise and fulfillment, substance and appearance.

Therefore I am not surprised (though I lament the thing, of course) that the Hon. Mr. Boggs should sense no difference, no essential divergence, no inherent unlikeness, between “from 16 to 18" and plain 16. In the harsh world of everyday the two things are as unlike as plus one and minus one. But in the suave world of boomery they are identical. And so with annual death rates and monthly death rates. We brute creatures, we woodpeckers and earthworms, think that the two are unlike. We believe that a monthly death rate, now and then, may fortuitously sink very low–and yet not drag down the annual death rate with it. We hold that when a man starts out to discuss annual death rates—ses the Hon. Mr. Boggs’ words—to wit, per annum–he should stick to annual death rates to the end, and not switch off to monthly death rates, or weekly death rates, or daily death rates.

But, after all, what is our opinion worth? What do we know about the world above us—the pinky world of boomery—with its boomiferous logic, its boomiferous dialect, its boomiferous calculus? Not a darn thing! We are gross savages, anthropophagi, beasts of the field. We worship Fact, that brazen calf. We subscribe absurdly to the damnable heresies. We believe, for example, that the death rate in Baltimore is disgracefully high. that it ought to be much lower, that the only way to make it lower, in the face of official stupidity and public ignorance, is to call attention to it, discuss it, deplore it, denounce it. The boomer knows better. He knows that the thing to do with a high death rate is to conceal it, edit it, deny it. He knows that the truth is a dangerous hobgoblin. He knows that it is extremely dangerous, in particular, to boomery—that it and boomery, indeed, are alkali and acid, oyster and sugar, cat and dog.

Overheard on a street car yesterday morning:

If they want to do some weeding in the City Hall, I can tell them where to start. There is a man down there getting $2,300 and he ain’t worth his own vote. They can never tell where he is at.

Freight observed of late on Baltimore street cars:

An iron casting. A brass casting. An air pump. A box of gear wheels. A bag of feed. Two bottles of ink. A can of oysters.

I take these items from the lists of lost articles published daily by the United Railways. The larger and smellier things, of course, are never left on the cars. Such assertive freight is not so easily overlooked.

More selections from the same illuminating lists:

A lantern. A pair of corsets. A can of varnish. A package of towels. A hack saw. A package of ballots.

The last item invites to painful speculation. Can it be that “package” is a euphemism for “bag”?

From “The Outcry,” the new novel by the polyphonic Henry James:

All to the upshot of his then speaking with a difference of tone, a recognition of still more of the odious than he had supposed. * * * They gave back a shade awkwardly and consciously, on one side and the other, the speculative through gracious attention she had for a few moments made them and their recent intimate relation the subject of. Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in this thought, for a more awkward force than by any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty.

Down go taxes! Sis! Up go assessments! Boom! Up to water rents! Ah!