Samuel Coleridge wrote as early as 1854:carl browne wrote:Sometimes the simplest terms are the hardest to define.
I am reminded of the comment that US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made regarding obscenity:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it . . . ."
The gentleman is not readily defined, but we know him when we see him, and there lies his appeal.
C
"There is something strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define."
The italics are not of mine.