Judge — June 4, 1921 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

H Perrtton Maxwett, Editor and Art Director Cottece Games HE paragraphers are making merry over the father who wrote and asked whether Harvard taught any other branches besides football and base- ball Doubtless many other fathers do not understand that the vinegar aspect of profundity must be masked to make col lege courses salable. The games suppress much jaundice and exhibit much jaunti- ness. In some universities, where there are no college games, there is as much warm blood as in a barrel of dried fish. The A. E. F. justified college games, for it was proven that the running starts enabled college men to be among the first wer the top; that games hardened the face to stand shaving in cold water, and stiffened the entrails to extract nourish ment from the regular chow of the ce yany cook Brains tossed around a gridiron, curdled like omelettes, and then unscrambling themselves in the class-room, found a battle-field a place of poise, serviceable merely to acquire an appetite for flap: jacks Mixing the grass and the wind in all unimals imparts vigor. The philosophy of the college game is not to make the bright eyes of the co-eds flash, as some folks have suspected. It is to fit the ani malistic part of the student to carry his intellectual part through this vale of tears without yelling for a derrick. Every college man has strong ribs, unless he is either a sybarite or a sitter, and the pur- pose of these ribs is to make a frame for war on the principle of Stonewall Jackson's impregnable front, and in peace to carry his load as far as Chauncey Depew. The few critics of college games forget that games have increased the stature of our race two inches, and that, had our students continued, like those of the Middle Ages, to exist on alms and soup-bones, we would now have a race of wizened ascetics, unable to crank a motor or fire the cook Occasionally some part of a competing student cracks on the field. But none crack in the classes, for the games fit them to stand brain-fag as well as to rebuff J. A. Wavpros, 4 apoplexy. And they add color to the stream and prevent the stagnation of the blood of erudition Manuracturinc Locat Names V E are putting sap and substance in our metropolitan local nomencla- ture. What a fine slaughter-house reck there is about Hell's Kitchen in New York Death Valley in Chicago and Bloody Angle in Philadelphia! Such are the lusty coinage of the police news. The police like their little joke—and the news passes on the sardonic euphemism as a faithful definition of a local social state. ‘o doubt there are police equivalents in London and other European cities for localities but locally known that tourists do not affect—names related to insurgent populations or based upon local eccentric- ities—although the journalism of London and Continental cities displays no such aptitudes for extreme local coloras American journalism, which has created fields of its own into many of which not even the more sensational London newspapers that imitat seem to be able to operate with effects at all comparable to our own In our days of primitive innocence we christened our sequestrated purlicus with such idyllic names as the Swamp, Green wich Village, or Fishtown. The nomen clature reflected the pastoral ca pacific and primitive community. But now, with the overstrained eagerness of a novelty-loving restlessness, we feed the vanity of the denizens of pest-holes, and encourage them to live up to the murder- ous reputation of the old home town. The advertising is free—dead-head publicity and it penetrates to the uttermost recesses of the habitable globe. The cit Yahoo Centre shiver at the news from the wicked cities, and the naked savage in the jungle. wiping the blood from his spiked club, feels a throb of emulous envy as he notes the ghastly appellatives stuck on the news columns like death-heads on castle walls. Making all due allowance for the humor of the journalistic cadets, it may with propriety be questioned whether the further spread of this graveyard lingo is good style. It is sure to grow by what it feeds on. Already a block on the subwa of a zens of invariably occurs at Dead Man's Curve. Already professional chauffeurs boast of how far they knock ‘em. Poking the wan face of horror into the monotony refreshes. L ut the habit nurses moral blind-staggers As we cannot blot out our metropolitan pestilence, it would seem bad public policy to spread the infection on the jesting wind Ane Moruers-ix-Law Ovr ot Fasuion? A MAN in Ohio has erected a monu * ment, with a laudatory inscription, to his mother-in-law. An institution which needs a monument is cither declining or dead. It is evident that mothers-in-law as decisive factors in promot efferves cence are about to become extinct It is possible that the Ohio monument veils an insincerity. But it looks like one of those sign-posts along the path of time that tell posterity that one epoch has ended and another begun. For posterity will read our jokes. It will note that root-joke was the mother-in-law, and that on her the subterfuges and irrepressibilities of many generations revenged themselves by pinning all perversity and domineering suspiciousness. Like racial animosities, the long war between man and his mother-in-law has e-writers. The been consecrated by j record of this war, now closed by a monu ment, is the most frolicsome waggery in all history. The future anthropologist noting that primitive barbarians killed their mothers-in-law, will solemnly record the recurrence of this custom in a modified form in our time, quote ferocious extracts from our jokes, and close the chapter by pointing to the Ohio monument as evidence of the decline of savagery in 1921. Contemporary observers know that this monument is neither an apology for malignity nor a vindication of innocence. We know that the mother-in-law has lost her vigor. She cannot compete with an age of machinery. Her tongue cannot clatter intelligibly over a wire. A flivver has no seat for her. The architects install no poop-deck for her captaincy. Sociology docs not analyze her. No jokes are made vher today. She is a survival, and there is nothing we can do but love her and erect a monument to her comicbooks.com