I’m rooting through boxes in my house looking for staples (of all the ignoble, mundane things) and I came across a letter I wrote to my dear aunt a couple of years ago, thanking her for xmas dinner, but written in the style of my much-missed and sesquipedaliac (using long words) grandfather, who welded phrases and tangents and parens and emdashes together with NASA-like precision.
It’s pretty funny, actually:
25 December, 1998
The scrivener (albeit at the risk of certain solipsism, or, at the very least, and at best, sesquipedality) wishes — nay, shall indeed indulge in — an epistollary gratuity to his recent hostess — the ‘brevity’ of which being — in fact — in danger of augmentation to a — perhaps inevitable?— prolixity, for, in this case, as is, peradventure, habitual (for the Author), the ‘soirée’ to which said epistle refers, does, in fact, and ipso facto, warrant such loquacity, such as it is, and as is deemed appropriate, by him.
“The punishment must fit the crime.” — (to essay an admittedly quasi-non-sequitur platitude à la Wm. Schwenck Gilbert [1836–1911].)
He, after quite near a demi-decade of absence, acknowledges, and, moreover, begs to impart his sentiments of pleasure, extruded from the inclusion (with familial compatriots) to the Nativity ‘festivations’, whereat, both the — much-lauded — repast, and, the ever-amenable côterie of ‘bonhomie’, found, once again, at the hostess’s most eleemosynary hearth, constructed an evening of (nearly) corporeally manifested memories.
He further, too, also, as well, suffers to ‘conjure’, with alarmingly pervasive benevolence, upon the person of the hostess, and those of her immediately-ubiquitous clan, a ‘grande fête’ (albeit assumed), for New Year’s Eve, and, with her perpetual indulgence, further hopes to convery to — or, truth be told, ‘demand’ — of 1999 (were it to be personified and yclept as such), a tacit obeisance to the hostess’s every caprice, no matter the size nor ‘intensity’.
Tomorrow’s encroaching ‘hamover’ notwithstanding, again, the Author wishes to reiterate and to quite ‘pepper’ the communiqué with thanks for a chair at the hostess’s jocular ‘do’.
And, if the scribe may be permitted to add — on a personal note — a wish (although perhaps retrospective), of Merry Xmas, that, too, may be (put with the vernacularity of said summoned intimacy) ‘called for.’
Verisimilitudinously,
le Marquis Déjà Dû
“I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.” — Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales [1656–1657]
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