guarded lips...

This from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Superlative"...

"There is a superlative temperament which has no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the manners of those who share it with a certain desperation. Their aspect is grimace. They go tearing, convulsed through life, - wailing, praying, exclaiming, swearing. We talk, sometimes, with people whose conversation would lead you to suppose that they had lived in a museum, where all the objects were monsters and extremes...they use the superlative of grammar : " most perfect," " most exquisite," " most horrible."... they are enchanted, they are desolate, because you have got or have not got a shoe-string or a wafer you happen to want, - not perceiving that superlatives are diminutives, and weaken ; that the positive is the sinew of speech, the superlative the fat. If the talker lose a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolution of things has come. Controvert his opinion and he cries "Persecution! " and reckons himself with Saint Barnabas, who was sawn in two...

How impatient we are, in these northern latitudes, of looseness and intemperance in speech! Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual's judgment. Doctor Channing's piety and wisdom had such weight that, in Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held. But I remember that his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of him in a circle of his admirers, said : I have known him long, I have studied his character, and I believe him capable of virtue."

Blessings