My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.

In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

Very few people have no opinions about cats.

By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.