Judith Martin: Words Worth Repeating

Bookish families have their pet quotations and references that they use in everyday life. For example, my grandmother would say to my mother, and my mother would say to me, "Yes, Gwendolyn, dear, whatever you want, Gwendolyn, as long as you are happy, that’s all that really matters."

Now, neither of us was named Gwendolyn. But as teenagers, we both had been given to acting imperiously on occasion (as what teenager has not?) and this was the gently sarcastic reprimand. It is not a quotation, but refers to Gwendolyn Harleth in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the glamour-puss of her family to whom her mother always deferred, and who came to a sad end.

If my grandmother conceded to going along with something others wanted to do, she did not say, "OK, whatever." She said, "Barkis is willin’." In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield Barkis, the coachman, sends this message to the nurse, Peggotty, expecting her to understand that it is a proposal of marriage.

Such conversational habits are far from the grandeur of quoting literature, which is why Shakespearean references don’t quite qualify. Rather, this is family shorthand or code, taken from each family’s own favorite books and used in common situations. (In public, my grandmother had only to say "Gwendolyn" to have my mother think "Uh-oh" and adjust her demeanor.) It is also an effective way to get the children to read those books, to find out what on earth the old folks are talking about.

We would like to hear yours.
Here are some of the others in my family:

"Up to a point, Lord Copper."
In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, that is what the foreign editor of the Beast says when he cannot quite give his other standard response to his chief, the press lord ("Definitely, Lord Copper") because his chief has said something dead wrong. It allows us to avoid saying, "You don’t know what you’re talking about."

"It was the salmon."
From Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, used, as Mr. Snodgrass does, to justify being in a questionable state. As the author adds parenthetically,  "Somehow or other, it never is the wine in these cases."

"I am Duchess of Malfi still."
The title character in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi says this when she knows she is about to be strangled, so we use it as a way of saying, "You got me, but I’m not really giving in."

"I am Henry IV, and have been these 20 years."
A very different meaning from the above — this is said in Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV by an alleged madman who is rich enough to have everyone indulge him in his impersonation of  that king; therefore, a way of saying, "OK, so I’m nuts, but that’s the way I am, so don’t give me a hard time."

"I’ve always wanted to wander in the Pyrenees."
"You’ll wander in them."
An exchange by the immobile characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (one of many we use, doing our best to reproduce the voices of Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall in the great New York production), this serves as the "I dunno" answer to "What do you want to do?" or "Where shall we go?"

"He rode madly off in all directions."(Full version: "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.")
Taken from Stephen Leacock’s Gertrude the Governess; or Simple Seventeen and useful when asked someone’s whereabouts, which you neither know nor think particularly important.

And of course, the most useful and widely quoted phrase of all —the triumph of the subordinate over the powerful — from Herman Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener, in which the title character refuses orders from his employer, including that of vacating the premises after being fired, by saying: "I would prefer not to."