June 24.

"Montaigne. The language of the street is always strong. What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is.... cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run. Moreover, they who speak them have this elegancy, that they do not trip in their speech. It is a shower of bullets, whilst Cambridge men and Yale men correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence . . . "

Two thoughts:
1. I wish my journal entries sounded like Emerson's (above).
2. I love Christmas break, and all the time it brings for me to simply read.
Three more days of twenty-twelve, and I think I'll spend them doing just that.