Word: writer
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...Scribner for January, proposing the plan of a Graduate Scholarship, to be open to applicants from every college in America. The Nation of February 20, in its customary tone of ignorant ridicule, throws cold water on the scheme, and severely criticises the author of the article in Scribner. The writer in the Nation grants that "liberally endowed and carefully administered scholarships are among the most efficient attainable means of higher education in our land," but thinks there would be great practical difficulty in finding an organization to properly administer this particular trust. We see no reason for apprehending such...
...assume to define the legitimate course of a public writer to any one, but merely to express an opinion in regard to it, and that opinion to bear chiefly upon but two of the important auxiliaries in its pursuit, - wit and humor...
...writer sits down for the purpose of producing a witty article, one that shall make the public laugh in spite of itself; an onerous task for two reasons, - the public is decidedly opposed to laughing without being tickled, and it is exceedingly difficult to find a sensitive spot whereon to apply the straw. By public we mean the average mass of thinking men and women, excluding wholly that class of constitutional gigglers who laugh alike at David's solemnity and Twain's humor...
With these facts before him our writer sends out his thoughts in search of something funny : but witticisms are coy birds and fly high; few are able to capture them at will, or furnish them to order. In nine cases out of ten, wearied with his fruitless endeavors, he descends to a lower plane, makes use of vulgarity, and passes it off for wit. Some, as we have before hinted, seem unable to distinguish between the genuine and the spurious article; others there are who, from their moral status, seem incapable of appreciating anything genuine, who derive their intellectual nourishment...
Nothing will more surely destroy the effect of a humorous story than ill-restrained laughter on the part of the narrator. If a writer would divest his article of all poignancy, he has only to show by his repetitions and redundant expressions that he is fully impressed with a conviction of his own mighty wit, and fearful that his readers will fail to discover...