A delicate operation

     "Can't waste the whole day talking. If there's anything the poor half-wit doesn't understand, explain it to him." He turned to Packy. "I want a word with you," he said. "Kiss Jane and come along."

    There are few things which call for so nice an exhibition of tact as the kissing of a girl in the presence of her fiance. Packy did his best to perform the feat in a manner calculted to cause the minimum of disapproval, but he was haunted by a suspicion that he had not quite got the sympathy of his audience.

    Abstaining from glancing at young Mr. Eggleston, for, after all, he knew what he looked like, he followed the Sentor off the terrace.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The oatmeal did it

    "So there was Blair with oatmeal on the back of his head and oatmeal all over his face, practically a mass of oatmeal, you might say, and then Father smiled a quiet, affectionate kind of smile and said, "I don't like oatmeal." And the whole thing has rather preyed on Blair's mind. He's a little cross about it, I'm afraid. He says I ought to have warned him what he was letting himself in for when he became Father's valet."

    "I don't see how you could have known."

    "Well, Father did tell me his valets never stayed with him more than a week or so,but he said he thought it must be due to this Bolshevist spirit that you see springing up on all sides. It's a great pity, of course, because it has made Blair a little peevish, and I don't think he's very happy."

    "I can quite see how he might not be. Personally, I'd sooner be somebody living in Chicago that Al Capone didn't much like than your father's valet."

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Frowning women

 Lady Beatrice Bracken was in the garden of her father's seat, Worbles, in Dorsetshire. She was reading for the third time Packy's letter announcing his departure for St. Rocque. Well knowing that resort to be a hot-bed of gambling and full of the most undesirable characters, notably the Vicomte de Blissac, she thoroughly disapproved of his choice of destination. As she read, she frowned. As she frowned, she tapped her foot. And as she tapped she said, "H'm!" And she meant it, too. At lunch that day her Aunt Gwendolyn had once more expressed the opinion that Packy was a flippertygibbet, and Beatrice found herself in complete agreement with the old fossil.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Act your age!

 Soup Slattery shared Packy Franklyn's austere distaste for fancy dress. Men who donned it he considered sissies, and, as for the other sex, he held that Lovely Woman forfeited all claim to reverent devotion when she put on baggy check trousers and sent about blowing a squeaker. And when positive dowagers, who should have been setting an example, suddenly assaulted perfect strangers with those long, curly things which shoot out like serpents when you puff into them, he felt that the limit had been overstepped.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Be it ever so humble

 Mr. Gedge, reading his correspondence, did not see the spreading prospect. Nor did he wish to. He was not fond of St. Rocque, and this morning it would have seemed less attractive to him than ever, for three of his letters bore Californian postmarks and their contents had aggravated the fever of his home-sickness. Ever since his marriage two years ago and the subsequent exodus to Europe he had been pining wistfully for California. The poet speaks of a man whose heart was in the Highlands, a-chasing of the deer. Mr. Gedge's was in Glendale, Cal., wandering round among the hot dogs and filling stations.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Soft pedal it

     "Aunt Gwendolyn said you were a flippertygibbet."

    "A what?"

    "A flippertygibbet."

    Packy drew himself up a little haughtily. Comment and criticism from his affianced he was prepared to accept. But when it came to her moth-eaten relations shooting ff their heads . . .

    "That's all right what that old cat-fancier and cheater at solitairs says," he replied with a dignity which became him well. "Here's a little message which you can pass on to her from me. You can tell her . . . No, on second thoughts, perhaps better not. Just give her my love and say I hope it chokes her."

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

I thought it was a recent expression

 "He saw his way clearly now. He just wouldn't do it, that was all. And if they didn't like it they could lump it." (from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

This book was first published in 1927. I would have assumed that "lump it" was a fairly recent expression, certainly from within my lifetime.

No women allowed

 James stared at the paper dumbly. He was utterly perplexed. He had not had the slightest intention of writing anything like this. To begin with, it was a rule with him, and one which he never broke, to allow no girls to appear in his stories. Sinister landladies, yes, and naturally any amount of adventuresses with foreign accents, but never under any pretext what may be broadly describrd as girls. A detective story, he maintained, should have no heroine. Heroines only held up the action and tried to flirt with the hero when he should have been busy looking for clues, and then went and let the villain kidnap them by some childishly simple trick. In his writing, James was positively monastic.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

How to write quality novels

 He held rigid views on the art of the novel, and always maintained that an artist with a true reverence for his craft should not descend to gooey love stories, but should stick austerely to revolvers, cries in the night, missing papers, mysterious Chinamen, and dead bodies - with or without gash in throat. And not even the thought that his aunt had dandled him on her knee as a baby could induce him to stifle his literary conscience to the extend of pretending to enjoy her work. First, last, and all the time, James Rodman had held the opinion - and voiced it fearlessly - that Leila J. Pinckney wrote bilge.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Concerning blackmailers who squint

     "Yes," he said, looking up, "if my calculations are correct, Leila J. Pinckney wrote in all a matter of nine million one hundred and forty thousand words of glutinous sentimentality at Honeysuckle Cottage, and it was a condition of her will that James should reside there for six months in every year. Failing to do this, he was to foreit the five thousand pounds."

    "It must be great fun making a freak will," I mused. "I often wish I was rich enough to do it."

    "This was not a freak fill. The conditions are perfectly undertandable. James Rodman was a writer of sensational mystery stories, and his aunt Leila had always disapproved of his work. She was a great believer in the influence of envionment, and the reason why she inserted that clause in her will was that she wished to compel James to move from London to the country. She considered that living in London hardened him and made his outlook on life sordid. She often asked him if he thought it quite nice to harp so much on sudden death and blackmailers with squints. Surely, she said, there were enough squinting blackmailers in the world without writing about them."

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

But not that

     "I have guessed your ghastly object, you ghastly object," he said quietly. You want me to photograph you."

    The Mayor shook his head. "Not myself. I realize that that can never be. My daughter."

    "Your daughter?"

    "My daughter."

    "Does she take after you?"

    "People tell me there is a resemblance."

    "I refuse," said Clarence.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
    

How to ruin an engagement

     "But I'm not going to be married."

    "You're - what did you say?"

    "I'm not going to be married?"

    "But what of Dillingwater?"

    "That's off."

    "Off?"

    "Off," said Jane firmly. "I only got engaged to him out of pique. I thought I could go through with it, buoying myself up by thinking what a score it would be off you but one morning I saw him eating a peach and I began to waver. He splashed himself to the eyebrows. And just after that I found that he had a trick of making a sort of funny noise when he drank coffee. I would sit on the other side of the breakfast table, looking at him and saying to myself, 'Now comes the funny noise!' and when I thought of doing all that the rest of my life I saw that the scheme was impossible. So I broke off the engagement."

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

One of those sorts!

 He might have known, he felt, that Desmond Franklyn would be a menace. The man was one of those lean, keen, hawk-faced, Empire-building sort of chaps you find out East - the kind of fellow who stands on deck chewing his moustache with a far-away look in his eyes, and then, when the girl asks him what he is thinking about, draws a short, quick breath and says he is sorry to be so absent-minded, but a sunset like that always reminds him of the day when he killed the four pirates with his bare hands and saved dear old Tuppy Smithers in the nick of time.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Love counts, but money counts more

     "Does love count for nothing? Surely you love me?"

    "Of course I do, my desert king. When you do that flat-footed Black Bottom step with the sort of wiggly twiggle at the end, I feel as if I were eating plovers' eggs in a new dress to the accompaniment of heavenly music." She sighed. "Yes, I love you, Lancelot. And women are not like men. They do not love lightly. When a woman gives her heart, it is for ever. The years will pass, and you will turn to another. But I shall not forget. However, as you haven't a bob in the world - " She beckoned to the hall-porter. "Margerison."

    "Your ladyship?"

    "Are the front steps clean?"

    "Yes, your ladyship."

    "Then throw Mr. Mulliner out."

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Odd-looking, what?

 Lancelot found himsel in a small, comfortably-furnished room, confronting a dignified-looking old man with a patrician nose and small side-whiskers, who looked like something that long ago had come out of an egg.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Advertising genius

Soon, soon all human joys must end:

Grim Death approaches with his sickle;

Courage! There is still time, my friend,

To eat a Briggs's Breakfast Pickle.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

But what is your name?

     "Marry you?" said the girl.

    "I love you as no man has ever loved woman before."

    "Well, that's always something. What would the name be?"

    "Mulliner. Lancelot Mulliner."

    "It might be worse."

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Gimp

     A girl like that - beautiful, lissom, and - as far as he had been able to tell at such a long range - gimp, was sure to be fond of dancing. The chances were, therefore, that sooner or later he would find her at some night club or other.

    He started, accordingly, to make the round of the night clubs. As soon as one was raided, he went on to another. Within a month he had visited the Mauve Mouse, the Scarlet Centipede, the Vicious Cheese, the Gay Fritter, the Placid Prune, the Cafe de Blogna, Billy's, Milly's, Ike's, Spike's, Mike's and the Ham and Beef. And it was at the Ham and Beef that at last he found her.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

You will note above the word gimp. Given that is has a number of meanings, among them those that are crude and offensive, I will explain that when this book was first printed (1927), it would have had the meaning of "spirit" or "vim," or in this case the adjective forms of those words. (The Roaring Twenties were noted for their colorful slang expressions.)

But not pickles

     At the tine at which my story opens (said Mr. Mulliner) Lancelot, then twenty-four years of age and recently come down from Oxford, was spending a few days with old Jeremiah Briggs, the founder and proprietor of the famous Briggs' Breakfast Pickles, on the latter's yacht at Cowes.

    This Jeremiah Briggs was Lancelot's uncle on the mother's side, and he had always interested himself in the boy. It was he who had sent him to the University; and it was the great wish of his heart that his nephew, on completing his education, should join him in the business. It was consequently a shock to the poor old gentleman when, as they sat together on deck on the first morning of the visit, Lancelot, while expressing the greatest respect for pickles as a class, firmly refused to start in and learn the business from the bottom up.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Big Chief Bloodenough

 General Sir Hector Bloodenough, V. C., K. C. I. E., M.V.O., on retiring from the army, had been for many years, until his final return to England, in charge of the Secret Service in Western Africa, where his unerring acumen had won for him from the natives the soubriquet of Wah-nah-B'gosh-B'jingo - which, freely translated, means Big Chief Who Can See Thrugh The Hole In A Doughnut.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Cheery outlook

 Now you, who have listened to the story of Augustine's previous adventures with the Buck-U-Uppo, are aware that my brother Wilfred invented it primarily with the object of providing Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face the tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sanfroid: and he had advocated as a medium dose for an adult elephant a teaspoonful stirred up with its morning bran-mash. It is not surprising, therefore, that after they had drunk two wine-glassfuls apiece of the mixture the outlook on life of both the bishop and the headmaster began to undergo a marked change.

(from Meet Mr. Mulliner, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Wideawake hat

 In the P. G. Wodehouse book, "Meet Mr. Mulliner," we find the term wideawake, referring to a style of hat. According to Wikipedia, it is "a broad brimmed felt 'countryman's hat' with a low crown, similar to a slouch hat. A wideawake hat is most commonly seen in dark shades of cloth, such as dark brown or black felt. The brim is fairly wide, and is flat in front and back but with a moderate upturn on the left and right sides."