Time & Perspective Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Business talk is the great masculine alibi: a socially sanctioned way to be busy, important, and morally upright while accomplishing almost nothing. Howe’s line needles that habit with editor’s precision. “Half the time” sounds mild, even generous, but it’s a trapdoor. By conceding only 50 percent, he makes the indictment feel measured, the way a good newspaper column lands harder by pretending not to shout.

The verb choice is the tell. Men “think” they’re talking business; they’re not necessarily lying, they’re self-deceived. Howe isn’t attacking commerce so much as the performance of commerce: the meetings that are really status rituals, the shop talk that doubles as gossip, the endless posturing disguised as “networking.” “Wasting time” is the blunt, unromantic verdict that punctures the mythology of industriousness. No euphemisms, no sympathy for the idea that busyness equals value.

Context matters: Howe lived through America’s late-19th- and early-20th-century boom in industry, salesmanship, and managerial culture, when “business” became a civic religion and the office a proving ground for manhood. As an editor, he would have watched the rhetoric of productivity creep into every corner of public life, even as newspapers filled with the sound of men congratulating themselves for “getting things done.”

The subtext is almost contemporary: if you want to know what a culture truly rewards, listen to what it calls work. Howe is warning that “business” can be a language game - a way to launder ego into duty.