"Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet"
About this Quote
Bramah skewers a very particular kind of social failure: the well-dressed mind that still can’t resist the lowest-hanging fruit. The line sets up “many thousand subjects for elegant conversation” as a buffet of civility and imagination, then shows how quickly people abandon it when discomfort walks into the room. The joke lands because it’s not really about feet. It’s about the compulsive need to domesticate difference by turning it into a topic, preferably the most literal, obvious, and dehumanizing one available.
His phrasing is surgical. “Elegant conversation” signals a class-coded ideal of wit and tact; “there are persons” sounds politely distant, but it’s a scalpel. The verb “cannot” is the key: he’s diagnosing a kind of social tic, an inability to sit with another person without reducing them to their most visible deviation from the norm. The cripple becomes an occasion, not a participant. Bramah exposes how quickly conversation becomes a power move: naming the body to control the room, to reassure oneself, to perform sympathy without the risk of actual empathy.
Context matters. Bramah, a late-Victorian/Edwardian writer with a satirist’s eye for manners, is working in a culture obsessed with propriety and “good form,” while disability was routinely treated as spectacle, moral lesson, or inconvenience. The wit is dark because the target is so recognizable: people who want credit for sensitivity while practicing a refined version of cruelty.
His phrasing is surgical. “Elegant conversation” signals a class-coded ideal of wit and tact; “there are persons” sounds politely distant, but it’s a scalpel. The verb “cannot” is the key: he’s diagnosing a kind of social tic, an inability to sit with another person without reducing them to their most visible deviation from the norm. The cripple becomes an occasion, not a participant. Bramah exposes how quickly conversation becomes a power move: naming the body to control the room, to reassure oneself, to perform sympathy without the risk of actual empathy.
Context matters. Bramah, a late-Victorian/Edwardian writer with a satirist’s eye for manners, is working in a culture obsessed with propriety and “good form,” while disability was routinely treated as spectacle, moral lesson, or inconvenience. The wit is dark because the target is so recognizable: people who want credit for sensitivity while practicing a refined version of cruelty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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