It happened to be the simplified spelling. He waved the
morning paper at the president and wanted to know what _he_ thought of
this outrageous thing of chopping off the tails of good old English
words with an official carving-knife, ruining a language that had been
fought and bled for at Lexington, and making it look like a dialect
story, or a woman with two front teeth out.
It rather strained the president sometimes to think of a sound train of
argument against Simon Gratz at a moment's notice. Sometimes he had to
abandon the beliefs of a lifetime in order to take the other side of a
proposition that Simon Gratz announced unexpectedly, and it was still
harder to get up an enthusiasm for one side of a thing of which he had
never heard, as he sometimes had to do; but he was ready to meet Simon
Gratz on either side of the simplified spelling matter, for he had read
about it himself in the morning paper. It had seemed a rather
unimportant matter until Simon Gratz mentioned it, but now it
immediately became a thing of the most intimate concern.
"What do I think?" he asked. "I think it is the grandest thing--the most
sensible thing--the greatest step forward that has been taken for
centuries.
Pages:
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40