Subtle is as subtle does.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS

MY DICTIONARY DEFINES subtle as "not immediately obvious; characterized by skill or ingenuity; clever; elusive; [even] insidious. Armed with this wide-ranging description, let us look at some concrete instances of this. (The very word itself is an example, as the letter "b" is silent in pronunciation.)

Language can be straight-forward and directly to the point, but sometimes that takes the fun out of it. On occasion, at least, one appreciates subtleties--often as the mark of a quick wit. This particularly is true of jokes that generally have a double meaning. For example: A waitress received only three pennies for a tip. Nonplussed, she told the customer that those three pennies told a lot about him. He took the bait and asked what they revealed. "The first penny," she said, "tells me you are thrifty." The patron agreed. "What does the second penny say?" asked the customer. "It tells me you're a bachelor," she replied. "Right again" he agreed. "And what does the third penny tell you?"--signaling that he now had swallowed not only the bait, but the hook, fine, and sinker. "The third penny," responded the waitress, "tells me your daddy was a bachelor, too." How's that for a subtle comeuppance?

In a similar vein, a parent asked her daughter's piano teacher how the student was doing and whether it was worthwhile to continue lessons. The teacher smiled and said, "She is not without a lack of talent." Would you continue or drop the lessons? Then there was the tourist in a French restaurant who ordered a bowl of soup but found a fly in it. Searching for his long-forgotten French, he victoriously recalled "fly" as "mouche" and, motioning the waiter, "Garcon," pointed to the soup, declaring, "Le Mouche!" Said the quick-thinking waiter, "La Mouche!" The customer, not to be outdone, muttered, "My, you have darn good eyesight."

Subtleties also can be used on occasion for a good putdown. For instance, one can say a certain man was a big gun of industry. "Yes," is the counter, "he was fired several times." Bragging about a friend who was a self-made man, the remark was added by the listener that he also "adored his maker." Then there is the fellow who boasted that he always got out of bed as soon as the sun came in his bedroom window. Not to let him get away with this, an acquaintance proffered that the man's bedroom faced the west. In this category was Mark Twain's caustic time bomb: "He was a good man--in the worst sense of the term."

Upon an...