Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock lands the joke by treating a fussy word like a social crime. "Angling" is technically correct, even genteel, but he frames it as a euphemism for incompetence: if you can actually catch fish, you call it fishing; if you mostly perform the idea of catching fish, you upgrade the label. The punchline isn’t about tackle, it’s about status-management.

The intent is classic Leacock: puncture pretension with a straight-faced observation that sounds like a field note. By putting "angling" in quotes, he marks it as a self-conscious affectation, a term chosen not for clarity but for cover. It’s the same logic behind calling a failure a "learning experience" or a layoff a "restructuring". Language becomes a life jacket for the ego.

Subtextually, the line mocks a certain leisure-class ritual. In late Victorian and Edwardian culture, "angling" carried connotations of sport, patience, even artistry - a pastoral hobby for people with time and money, not just hunger. Leacock flips that romance into a tell: the more ornate the term, the less likely the result. You can almost see the well-dressed fisherman narrating his "day on the water" while returning home empty-handed.

Context matters: Leacock, an economist by training and a satirist by vocation, loved exposing the small hypocrisies that keep social hierarchies polished. Here, he reduces a whole performance of taste and refinement to its outcome: did you catch anything? If not, enjoy your "angling."