Judge, 1912-11-02 · page 10 of 24
Judge — November 2, 1912 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes the power of polite social conventions to defuse awkward situations. The main article describes two domestic disasters—a neighbor's dog destroying the narrator's prized lawn, and another dog eating a custard dessert—where potential confrontations are smoothly resolved by simply exchanging pleasantries like "Good evening!" and "Rather warm!" The satire's point: trivial courtesies are society's lubricant. The phrases themselves are meaningless, yet they're so socially powerful that they prevent conflict and allow people to save face in embarrassing moments. By treating these minor salutations as lifesavers, Judge mocks both their actual importance and society's reliance on them to paper over real problems. The top illustration depicts the chaos described—wrecked vehicles and destruction—as "imagined" chaos from reading sensational newspaper headlines, contrasting fantasy with mundane reality. The smaller poem at bottom appears unrelated: a domestic drama involving infidelity, resolving the page's satirical tone.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
MONDAY MORNING AS WE IMAGINED IT AFTER READING THE MORNING PAPER. ‘*Good Some people think that little saluta- tions like ‘‘Good evening!’ and “Warm day!"’ are very foolish. But there are not four more important words in the language than these four. We can utter them when we can’t say anything else and have to say something. I have a new lawn. It has been sodded. I spend four hours a day squirting water on it. It has been seeded. It has been fer- tilized. There are nine blades of grass in the thickest of the fight—or, rather, there were, I kept that oasis wa- tered night after night. The grass almost floated. The other evening, after I had spent my four hours in carefully applying moisture to that jungle, a dog came over from my neighbor’s premises and scratched it up cheerfully and with much tail wagging. It appears to have been good digging in the spot which I had cherished. Just as I was engaged in seeing if I could make a dent in that dog, the owner came out suddenly and confronted me. “Good evening!”’ I said, and the situ- ation was relieved. On another occasion mother made some delicious custard and set it out on WHaT HE SAW. Evening! 9 the back porch to cool. Two minutes later she saw that the bottom of the bowl was clean and shiny. Just as she was engaged in an experiment to ascer- tain whether a poker would bounce off a houn’ dog’s back or not, the minister happened in on a parochial call. Mother, with great presence of mind, availed herself of the life-saving couplet. “Good evening!" she said. “Rather warm!’’ an- swered the minister. Thus was the situation Pater—"Well, son, did you see ‘em milk the cows while you were on the farm 2"" Juvenile—"* No, daddy ; but I seed the man pallin’ the corks out of ‘em.’” saved. Hamilton Pope Galt. The Cause. She searched his trousers While he slept; She found a note, And then she wept. The note was not An “*X" or “V."" The note was signed, “Yours, Dottie Lee.’’ comicbooks.com