The Language of Composition: "Corn-Pone Opinions" by Mark Twain

He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man—a slave—who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience.

He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man—a slave—who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience.

He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood; but the sawing was a pretense—he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood.

A new thing in costume appears—the flaring hoopskirt, for example—and the passers-by are shocked, and the irreverent laugh.

No. The instinct that moves to conformity did the work. It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist.

Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and diffuse; some authority or other changed it in the direction of compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument.

Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest—the bread-and-butter interest—but not in most cases, I think.

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon.