Volume 1

The lost senses / By John Kitto.

  • John Kitto
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The lost senses / By John Kitto. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the same colloquial abbreviation ; and it must have been of great aid to a foreigner to have every word and syllable thus distinctly pronounced. This necessarily gave a kind of stiffness and pre- ciseness to my language. Indeed, I seem to have had a singular reluctance to use any but the substantial words of the language, and my practical vocabulary was and is singularly void of all expletives and adjuncts, of all complimentary phrases, and even of terms of en- dearment. I was touchingly reminded of the last characteristic a short time since, when one of my little boys suddenly quitted my study, and hastened to tell his mother that I had for the first time in his life called him “ Dear.” This disposition to confine myself to the words essentially necessary to convey my meaning—the dry hard words without the flowers and derivative adjuncts which custom had made to represent the amenities of social intercourse, must perhaps give an air of rigidity and harshness to my spoken language, which pre- vents it from being, I trust, a faithful representa- tive of my feelings or character. The conventional talk, which stands in the place of intercourse with those to whom one has nothing real to say, I never could manage, and have preferred to be altogether silent than to resort to it. I could never, by the utmost stretch of violence upon my acquired disposition, bring myself to express much solicitude about the health of those whom I saw to be per- fectly well; or to exchange or make remarks upon the weather, and say—“ It is very warm”—“ It, is a foggy morning ”— “ It is very cold ”—“ It threatens to rain ”—to those who must be as fully aware of the facts as myself. In like manner I
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