Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Pope

Gossip moves faster than truth, and Pope treats it like a kind of casual murder: each tossed-off remark kills a name. The line lands with the clean brutality of an epigram, compressing social violence into a single repeated motion: word, death, word, death. That rhythm matters. "At ev'ry word" isn’t just frequency, it’s inevitability - as if conversation in polite society has become a machine designed to grind down reputations.

Pope is writing from inside a culture where "reputation" isn’t a private self-esteem project; it’s social currency, especially in courtly and aristocratic circles where access, marriage prospects, patronage, and survival hinge on what others say when you’re not in the room. The subtext is bleakly comedic: people who pride themselves on refinement wield language as a weapon with plausible deniability. No blood on the hands, only wit on the tongue. The contraction "ev'ry" even performs the speed and slipperiness of talk, making the line feel like it’s already been whispered.

Contextually, Pope’s moral satire (most famously in works like The Rape of the Lock and the Epistles) thrives on exposing how elegance can mask cruelty. He’s not simply warning against slander; he’s indicting a whole social system that turns speech into sport and status into a scoreboard. The sting is that reputations don’t die because the victims are guilty, but because the audience is bored, competitive, and eager to feel superior. The line is a miniature theory of media, too: once words circulate, damage becomes frictionless - and accountability evaporates.