If you are not watchful, the persistent use of phrases will not only creep into almost every conversation—several times, in fact—but those phrases will' influence the reaction of the mind.
Habit is a sympathetic thing, as we all know, sometimes too well, and itis astonishing how the mind will just do whatever we have trained it to do. It is the way with those irritating phrases to which we are, most of us, anyway, subject.
Doosn't it annoy you to be ever stoning $ some one, innocently enough, using that phraso—"The point is this"? Now it is useful in Tt has its places but when we use it at the beginning, in the middle, fand at the end of a sentence, it Toses all its value, and stamps' 'a8 of the genus parrot, The trouble that this spontaneous use of a futile phrase chokes the mind. keeps out the expression of another and more pertinent thought. It has answered to our training. And that is the serious danger.
In due time, if we give war to it, we shall not so quickly respond to initiative, and our mind will slip back a pace or two.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.