It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.
I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.
It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?
Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.
I have a cultured manner of speaking.
There's something very polite about the British accents. It's sort of sanitizing.
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
I grew up with a posh English accent, and all my aunts sounded as if they came out of a Merchant Ivory movie.
A man of fashion never has recourse to proverbs, and vulgar aphorisms; uses neither favourite words nor hard words, but takes great care to speak very correctly and grammatically, and to pronounce properly; that is, according to the usage of the best companies.
I used to get called Lady Penelope at school because the other kids thought I spoke nicely.
I don't use coarse language very often. I have a larger vocabulary than that.
Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man.
It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.
You follow words of the toga (language of the cultivated class). [Lat., Verba togae sequeris.]
