I have decided I need to learn something new every day. It’s after 5pm and I’ve learned nothing today.

There are 733 books in the den. Two 2.5′ x 6′ bookshelves’ worth is almost all fiction–mostly classics. Still. I ought to be able to learn something from the others.

Oh! In addition, I just this afternoon downloaded Kennth C. Clark’s Civilisation from Archive. Only took an hour to download the zip file, 7+ gigs when expanded. Plus I have an external hard drive with every issue of NatGeo from 1888 through 2008. Might be something in one of those.

Okay. Here we go. And worth quoting in its entirety.

genteelism. By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first sug­gests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less im­proper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. The truly genteel do not ask but enquire, invite one to step, not to come this way, may detect an unpleasant odour but not a nasty smell, never help, but assist each other to potatoes, of which may have sufficient, but never mind enough, do not go to bed but retire for the night; and have quite forgotten that could ever have been guilty of sitting-room, napkin, and dirty clothes where nothing will now do for them but lounge, serviette, and soiled linen.

The reader need hardly be warned that the inclusion of any particular word in the small selection of genteelisms offered below does not imply that that word should never be used. All or most of these, and of the hundreds that might be classed with them, have their proper uses, in which they are not genteel, but natural. Lounge is at home in hotels, step in the dancing class, retire for the superannuated man, and so forth; but out of such contexts, and in the conditions explained above, the taint of gentility is on them. To illustrate a little in detail, ‘He went out without shutting the door’ is plain English; with closing substituted for shutting it becomes genteel; nevertheless, to close the door is justified if more is implied than the mere not leaving it open; ‘Before beginning his story, he crossed the room and closed the door’, i.e. so placed it so as to prevent eavesdropping; ‘Six people sleeping in a room with closed windows, i.e. excluding air. Or again, ‘The schoolroom roof fell in, and two of the boys ( or girls,, or children) were badly injured’; scholars for boys etc. would be a genteelism, and a much more flagrant one than closing in the previous exam­ple; yet scholar is not an obsolete or archaic word; it is no longer the natural English for a schoolboy or schoolgirl, that is all. The point is that, when the word in the second column of the list that follows is the word of one’s thought, one should not consent to displace it by the word in the first column unless an improvement in the meaning would result. The reader will easily increase the list for himself; he may also be disposed to amend it by omission. Genteelisms, if they attain a wide enough currency, soon rub their taint off by use.

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage Second Edition, H.W. Fowler, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1965, pg. 222

Genteelism. That has some serious Missy-ism potential, don’t you think?