WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Marlborough Express, Volume IV, Issue 163, 13 March 1869, Page 4

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

To the Editor of the Marlborough Express. Slit, —Looking over your paper during the week, I alighted upon a letter in your correspondence column, in which I discovered what appears to me a very complex sentence. The letter in question is signed C. J. Rae, and the sentence runs as follows:—“ In the bosom of my own family I have society superior to that of ‘ Common Salt,’ and I am happy to say that by birth and education I enjoy the right of sitting above it.” I should have taken no notice of the letter had C.

J. R. confined himself to what he wanted to say. I have turned to Common Salt’s letter, and I do not find anything very outre in it ; at any rate, nob sufficient to raise the ire of C. J. R., unless the cap fitted uncommonly well. All this has nothing to do with the sentence I want elucidating. It is not often that men can be found to publicly complain about the station held by their own families, especially when they wish to appear something more than they are. Yet we find Mr 0. J. R. saying that he enjoys the right of sitting above the society of his own family ; perhaps he meant Common Salt’s society, but it does not appear so in the letter. Most people are liable to mistakes ; I certainly am not an exception to the general rule, and my errors are numerous. Still, I think a man who prates about possessing “ birth and education” superior to the common should be careful before he lays his lucubrations before the gaze of an admiring public. Who knows ? It may happen that some of the letters which appear in your columns will come out again in a new dress, and be incorporated with a iN'ew Zealand Grammar, from which our descendants will be taught to speak the English language correctly. If such should happen, those of your correspondents who desire to be immortalised in the pages of a grammar must be cautious, or they will not, be able to obtain such a distinction. Had C. J. R. not paraded his “birth and education,” you would not have received tins communication from me ; but when a person boasts, and in his very boasting proves how different he is from what he pretends, he deserves all the praise he is likely to get. I expect to have numerous errors discovered in this, but I can only say in excuse, that I am not “educated” as some of your correspondents are. I am &c., Capsicum. [We presume that what was meant by the writer alluded to, was that he had the rLh; “ to sit above the ‘Salt,’” a position at table denied to any but those of gentle blood in olden times. —E o., M.E.]