Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Baldwin Ross

Oxford here isn’t a place so much as a posture: a cultivated way of speaking, joking, and judging that signals membership before it communicates meaning. Ross’s line lands because it stages a tiny rhetorical pratfall. He begins with the polite lament, “alas,” then pretends to offer an academic formulation (“indefinable”), only to pivot into the real verdict (“indefensible”). The wit is in the self-correction: he’s caught himself almost doing the Oxford thing - smoothing over a social critique with a clever abstraction - and then refuses the escape hatch.

Ross knew the world he’s skewering. As Oscar Wilde’s close friend and literary executor, he lived at the border between establishment respectability and scandal, between high culture and the prices it exacted. The “Oxford manner” evokes that late-Victorian/Edwardian confidence: irony as armor, understatement as superiority, taste disguised as reason. Calling it “indefinable” suggests the manner’s power comes from its slipperiness; you can’t pin it down, so you can’t easily prosecute it. Calling it “indefensible” snaps the trap shut: the whole point of the manner is to avoid being held to account, to treat responsibility like a breach of etiquette.

The subtext is class warfare conducted with teaspoons. Ross isn’t railing against education; he’s targeting a social technology that turns privilege into a tone of voice, moral cowardice into charm. The line’s brilliance is that it performs what it criticizes - the epigram, the feint, the sting - while also exposing the cynicism underneath.