“Gentleman. It is not possible to teach the correct use of this overworked word: one must be bred to it. Everybody knows that it is not synonymous with man, but among the ‘genteel’ and those ambitious to be thought ‘genteel’ it is commonly so used in discourse too formal for the word ‘gent.’ To use the word gentleman correctly, be one.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
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