A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

fog which stands for clearness among these people.

For surely it is NOT clearness–it necessarily can’t

be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough

to discover that. A writer’s ideas must be a good

deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence,

when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor’s

wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this

so simple undertaking halts these approaching people

and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory

of the woman’s dress. That is manifestly absurd.

It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant

and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it

with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through

a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk.

Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they

make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it

at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER

HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything

more confusing than that? These things are called

“separable verbs.” The German grammar is blistered

all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two

portions of one of them are spread apart, the better

the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

A favorite one is REISTE AB–which means departed.

Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced

to English:

“The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his

mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom

his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin,

with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich

brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale

from the terror and excitement of the past evening,

but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again

upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than

life itself, PARTED.”

However, it is not well to dwell too much on the

separable verbs. One is sure to lose his temper early;

and if he sticks to the subject, and will not be warned,

it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it.

Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance

in this language, and should have been left out.

For instance, the same sound, SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE,

and it means HER, and it means IT, and it means THEY,

and it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of a

language which has to make one word do the work of six–and

a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that.

But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing

which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey.

This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me,

I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity

would have been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason,

the inventor of this language complicated it all he could.

When we wish to speak of our “good friend or friends,”

in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and have

no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German

tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands

on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining

it until the common sense is all declined out of it.

It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:

SINGULAR

Nominative–Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.

Genitives–MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.

Dative–MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.

Accusative–MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.

PLURAL

N.–MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends. G.–MeinER gutEN

FreundE, of my good friends. D.–MeinEN gutEN FreundEN,

to my good friends. A.–MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.

Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize

those variations, and see how soon he will be elected.

One might better go without friends in Germany than take

all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother

it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is