A study on Elegant Speech

[storeynicholas]

Costi - I thought that you'd enjoy that one! It is certainly true that it is quite right to tell people where to "get off". It is a keystone of self-respect; which, itself, is mirrored in neatness of person and wearing appropriate clothes for the time and place. Of all that my parents taught my sister and me, from small children, an acute appreciation of this necessity to stand up for ourselves (tempered by mildness afterwards), is undoubtedly one of the greatest of their gifts to us:
http://www.bartleby.com/101/32.html
Moreover, if we do not respect ourselves enough to stand up for ourselves (and others) then people soon sniff out this weakness and we end up as door mats.

One of my very favourite films is The Winslow Boy , from the Rattigan play, which tells the story of George Archer Shee who had been a thirteen year old naval cadet at Osborne Royal Naval College in 1908. Without any proper inquiry, he was summarily expelled for allegedly having stolen and cashed another boy's postal order for five shillings. Convinced that his son's protestations of innocence were true, his father retained the services of one of the greatest of advocates at the time, Sir Edward Carson. They could not sue the government over the matter but they could, and did, bring a Petition of Right and the Solicitor-General appeared for the government: a long and cumbersome process. After Carson's tremendous opening of his case; the boy had given his evidence and the government's evidence been shown to have been unreliable in the extreme, the Solicitor-General issued a written statement accepting the boy's innocence "without reservation of any kind". Sometimes, life calls upon us to go to extremes to protect ourselves. It took a debate in Parliament for the family to get their costs and compensation.

George Archer Shee was commissioned into the army on the outbreak of WWI and killed in action at Ypres in October 1914.

NJS