Baltimore Evening Sun (18 December 1911): 6.

Only 1,248 days more! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away!

As rare as a boomer who crawls under the table when a flashlight photograph is to be taken * * *

If I had knowed how easy it was goin’ to be to get away with that stuffin’, I would have went to work and did some of it myself.

From one athirst for sound information in the department of etiquette.

Is it improper, then, as you hint, for a man’s relatives-in-law to address him by his first name?

Not only improper, but impertinent, vulgar, insulting, indecent—in a very real and lamentable sense, obscene. Nothing, indeed, could be more offensive to a man of self-respect than to have mere strangers, persons whose existence is obtruded upon his notice by sheer accident, address him familiarly by his first name. That privilege he reserves for his blood relatives and his intimates. It is a privilege that he does not grant lightly. He is extremely jealous of it. Its unauthorized assumption wounds and enrages him more than any other conceivable affront. When he confers it he confers the very highest honor within his gift. And he is at liberty to withdraw it whenever he pleases. It never becomes a vested right, save in the case of his blood relatives of the first degree of consanguinity. In the case of all other persons whatsoever it is never more than a franchise, revokable at one minute’s notice.

Among these “other persons,” of course, a man’s wife must be reckoned. When he consents to marry her he tacitly confers upon her, along with many other high privileges and prerogatives, the license to address him by his first name. That gift, true enough, is not compulsory, but I admit that it is at least customary. The fact, however, that it is bestowed immediately anterior to marriage, freely and voluntarily, is by no means a sign that it is bestowed permanently. A man, indeed, has a perfect right to withdraw it from his wife whenever her conduct suggests to him that she is unworthy of it, and though the laws of the land do not support him in that right and he cannot prosecute his wife criminally if she invades it, yet the higher laws of good taste, of morality, of civilized living, are on his side.

I know a man who had occasion, several years ago, to divorce his wife for gross frauds. She and her mother deceitfully led him to believe, before he married her, that she was a firstclass cook. An habitual and voluptuous eater, he therefore married her—and was astounded to discover that she could scarcely distingutsh between a rasher of pfannhase and an oyster fritter. So he divorced her—and quite properly. Well, that woman is now married again, to a poisoned ignoramus from Pittsburgh—and every time she meets my friend, on the streets or in theatre lobbies, she gives him a wink and calls him “George.” The poor fellow’s sufferings are heartrending. I have seen him stop, blanch and grab a lamp-post for support. Forced to submit to the insult incessantly, he is gradually losing his self-respect. His mind decays. He is not the man he was.

But this, of course, is an extreme, an exaggerated case. Most men do not divorce their wives. Most men, I am convinced—despite a lot of evidence to the contrary—get on pretty well with their wives. Man is a sturdy brute. He can get used to anything—even to his wife’s conversation. His auricular nerves, one may say, generate antitoxins to it. Benign psychic opsonins protect him. Therefore, he is usually on good terms with his wife, and as a consequence, he is seldom offended by her use of his first name in addressing him. But with his wife’s relatlves the case is different. Here he is among strangers—persons for whom he doesn’t care a hoot—persons whose very existence he must needs lament, as an unavoidable calamity, a drawback, a distressing necessity—persons who inspire in him, if they inspire any emotion at all, an impulse to homicide. And yet these interlopers in his life, these uitlanders from Barbary, these grotesque symbols of the de trop, assert and assume the right to call him by his first name!

It isn’t fair. It isn’t decent. It isn’t right. And because society, in the face of its obvious wrongness, yet condones and authorizes the custom—for that reason thousands of men shrink from marriage. It is usually a psychic reason, and not a material reason that keeps a man single, and of all psychic reasons this is one of the most powerful. Unmarried, a man may choose his acquaintances, or at least his intimates. He is free to flee from familiarity. He may snub or even wallop any person who presumes to invade his dignity. But married, he must submit supinely to the georging and jacking of his wife’s brothers and sisters, of her cousins, of her singularly disagreeable uncles and aunts, of her ancient granddams and grandpops, even of her old schoolmates. And so the sensitive, the dignified, the austere man, appalled by such contingencies, lives out his life a capella and passes away in the end without grief or progeny.

If Harry Nice don’t get a soft job for holdin’ that baggin’ scare out of them rotten newspapers, then all I got to say is, politics ain’t nothing like it used to be no more.

The death is announced of the Hon. Norman M. Parrott’s plan for a Christmas carnival. The coroner is investigating.

Disconcerting note from a Baltimore physician:

A somewhat elaborate inquiry convinces me that $100,000 is spent in Baltimore each year for proprietary consumption “cures”—all of which are unmitigated and indefensible frauds and all of which are advertised in the newspapers.

Oh, la, la! Oh, la, la, la! The knocker! The woodpecker! The bad, bad man!

The insoluble problems of life in our fair city:

1. What could be dirtier than a Baltimore alley?
2. What could be funnier than a Prominent Baltimorean?
3. What could be worse than the City Council?

Whether ’tis better to own a $1,500 house in Baltimore, paying taxes, sur-taxes and super-taxes, or to lie ill of lumbago and St. Vitus’ dance * * *

A can of condensed milk to any member of the Committee on Bogus Statistics of the Honorary Pallbearers’ Association who will state publicly, on his word of honor, that he believes the death rate in Baltimore last year to have been less than 18.5 per 1,000 population.