I had to listen to the uncouth, coarse chatter of some good Holland bourgeois [while on the train]. Their conversation, which was carried on in extremely boisterous tones, appeared to me horribly vulgar. Speaking a foreign language has the advantage of making one strive to find the right expression, instead of breaking out in all sorts of old commonplace phrases. Moreover, stupidities never sound so foolish in any language as in one’s own. During that half-hour I actually suffered. At last the train came to a halt. I was in Haarlem. “Good-bye, gentlemen, much pleasure!” exclaimed a passenger who got out of the train with me. “Yes, yes, much pleasure,” I murmured sarcastically, “it has been charming. The next time may your mouths be frozen up tight.”
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
17 August 2018
May Your Mouths Be Frozen up Tight
Willibrord Verkade, Yesterdays of an Artist-Monk, tr. John Stoddard (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1930), pp. 272-273: