wipe—to steal a handkerchief. A rum start—a curious occurrence. A plant—an imposition. Flummoxed—undone. Sold—deceived. A heavy swell—a great dandy. Quibus, tin, dibs, mopuses, stumpy—money. Grub, prog, tuck—victuals. A stiff-’un—a dead body—properly, a subject. To be scragged—to suffer the last penalty of the law, &c.
All these kinds of Latin are to be taught in the Comic Latin Grammar.
If Toby, the learned pig, had been desired to say his alphabet in Latin, he would have done it by taking away the W from the English alphabet. Indeed, this is what he is said to have actually done. The Latin letters, therefore, remind us of the greatest age that a fashionable lady ever confesses she has attained to,—being between twenty and thirty.
Six of these letters are called what Dutchmen, speaking English, call fowls—vowels; namely, a, e, i, o, u, y.
A vowel is like an Æolian harp; it makes a full and perfect sound of itself. A consonant cannot sound without a vowel, any more than a horn (except such an one as Baron Munchausen’s) can play a tune without a performer.
Consonants are divided into mutes, liquids and double letters; although they have nothing in particular to do with funerals, hydrostatics, or the General post office. The liquids are, l, m, n, r; the double letters, j, x, z; the other letters are mutes.
“Hye dum, dye dum, fiddle
dumb
—c.” —
Sterne
.
A syllable is a distinct sound of one or more letters pronounced in a breath, or, as we say in the classics, in a jiffey.
A diphthong is the sound of two vowels in one syllable. Taken collectively they resemble a closed fist—i.e. a bunch of
fives
. The diphthongs are au, eu, ei, æ, and œ. Of the two first of these, au and eu, the sound is
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