archaic language part one

Jeeves and Wooster



Jeeves &Wooster S01 E01 Part 1/5 - YouTube

Jeeves - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jeeves Takes Charge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I shall always remember the  morning he came.  It  so happened that the
night before I had been present at a  rather cheery little supper, and I was
feeling pretty rocky. On  top of this I was trying  to read  a book Florence
Craye had given me. She  had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and  two
or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of
the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by  then.
You see, she was particularly  keen on  boosting me up a bit nearer  her own
plane of intellect.  She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to
the gills  in  serious purpose.  I can't  give you a better idea  of the way
things  stood than by telling you that the  book she'd given  me to read was
called  'Types of Ethical  Theory', and that when  I opened  it  at random I
struck a page beginning:

     The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is
     certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the
     social organism of which language is the instrument, and the
     ends of which it is an effort to subserve.

     All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on  a
lad with a morning head.

     I was doing  my best to skim through this bright little volume when the
bell  rang. I  crawled off the sofa  and  opened the door. A kind of darkish
sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

     'I was sent  by the agency, sir,'  he said. 'I was  given to understand
that you required a valet.'

     I'd  have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he
floated  noiselessly  through  the  doorway  like  a  healing  zephyr.  That
impressed me from the  start. Meadows had had flat  feet and  used to clump.
This fellow didn't seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had
a grave, sympathetic  face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with  the
lads.

P.G.Wodehouse. Jeeves takes charge

.

.

.