A nice, comfortable relationship

     The five-ten was late as usual, and everybody was dressing for dinner when I arrived at the Hall. It was only by getting into my evening things in record time ana taking the stairs to the dining-room in a couple of bounds that I managed to dead-heat with the soup. I slid into the vacant chair, and found that I was sitting next to old Wickhammersley's youngest daughter, Cynthia.

    "Oh, hallo, old thing," I said.

    Great pals we've always been. In fact, there was a time when I had an idea I was in love with Cynthia. However, it blew over. A dashed pretty and lively and attractive girl, mind you, but full of ideals and all that. I may be wronging her, but I have an idea that she's the sort of girl who would want a fellow to carve out a career and what not. I know I've heard here speak favourably of Napoleon. So what with one thing and another the jolly old frenzy sort of petered out, and now we're just pals. I think she's a topper, and she thinks me next door to a looney, so everything's nice and matey.

(from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Fish-face

     I then perceived hat the stout stripling had trickled into the room after Jeeves. He was standing near the door looking at Cyril as if his worst fears had been realized. There was a bit of a silence. The child remained there, drinking Cyril in for about half a minute; then he gave his verdict.

    "Fish-face!"

    "Eh? What?" said Cyril. The child, who had evidently been taught at his mother's knee to speak the truth, made his meaning a trifle clearer.

    "You've a face like a fish!"

    He spoke as if Cyril was more to be pitied than censured, which I am bound to say I thought rather decent and broad-minded of him. I don't mind admitting that, whenever I looked at Cyril's face, I always had a feeling that he couldn't have got that way without its being mostly his own fault. I found myself warming to this child. Absolutely, don't you know. I liked his conversation.

(from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Waukeesi

 This term is found in The Inimitable Jeeves, first published by P. G. Wodehouse in 1923. I found an explanation of it on the blog "The Annotated Wodehouse."

+++

The Waukeezi Shoe Company Limited of Northampton sold shoes and boots during the first half of the 20th century. Readers unaccustomed to mentally pronouncing ‘walk’ in British fashion may not immediately realize the brand name is a play on ‘walk easy.’ Or at least, I didn’t. This may be both the only time Wodehouse spelled the brand name Waukeezi with a Y, and the only time he felt it necessary to add the classifying noun ‘shoe.’ He more usually preferred to use the brand name as a metonym for foot (or feet): ‘Put the old Waukeesi down with a bang’ as Wodehouse wrote in the Bertie Wooster story ‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’ or, more commonly, ‘pick up the old waukeesies,’ (meaning ‘let's go; hurry up’). So far as I have been able to determine, Wodehouse always spelled the brand name with an S, never a Z (as used by the actual brand).

Confounded letters of introduction!

 You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part. It's one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age. What I mean to say is, if a fellow in those days wanted to give anyone a letter of introduction, he had to spend a month or so carving it on a large-sized boulder, and the chances were that the other chappie got so sick of lugging the thing round in the hot sun that he dropped it after the first mile. But nowadays it's so easy to write letters of introduction that everybody does it without a second thought, with the result that some perfectly harmless cove like myself gets in the soup.

(from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Eftsoons

 "If you take my tip you jolly well will, and that eftsoons or right speedily." (from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

I don't know about you, but "eftsoons" is not a word that I use every day. It means "soon after" and is listed in the dictionary as being an archaic word. But, of course, archaic does not mean that it is wrong. So you can still use it, and people will think you are smart for doing so.

Under Aunt Agatha's thumb

 The hotel which had had the bad luck to draw Aunt Agatha's custom was the Splendide, and by the time I got there there wasn't a member of the staff who didn't seem to be feeling it deeply. I sympathized with them. I've had experience of Aunt Agatha's hotels before. Of course, the real rough work was all over when I arrived, but I could tell by the way everyone groveled before her that she had started by having her first room changed because it hadn't a southern exposure and her next because it had a creaking wardrobe and that she had said her say on the subject of the cooking, the waiting, the chamber-maiding and everything else, with perfect freedom and candour. She had got the whole gang nicely under control by now. The manager, a whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, simply tied himself into knots whenever she looked at him.

(from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The good old days

     A resilient bird, Bingo. He may be down, but he is never out. While these little love affairs of his are actually on, nobody could be more earnest and blighted; but once the fuse has blown out and the girl has handed him his hat and begged him as a favour never to let her see him again, up he bobs as merry and bright as ever. If I've seen it happen once, I've seen it happen a dozen times.

    So I didn't worry about Bingo. Or about anything else, as a matter of fact. What with one thing and another, I can't remember ever having been chirpier than at about this period in my career. Everything seemed to be going right. On three separate occasions horses on which I'd invested a sizeable amount won by lengths instead of sitting down to rest in the middle of the race, as horses usually do when I've got money on them.

(from The Inimitable Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)