"You know that among savages certain words are taboo and that in the Middle Ages certain words possessed magic properties? The same thing applies to the army and to the navy. For instance, the navy has a word of power that will open anything. That word is 'submit'. If you wrote 'submitted' at the top of a communication I believe you could tell an admiral that he was a damn fool, but if you wrote 'suggested' you'd be shot at dawn. In the same way a naval officer indorses your 'submission' by writing 'approved' whereas a soldier writes 'concur.' I've often wondered what would happen to a general who wrote 'agree'. Certainly any junior officer who wrote 'begin' for 'commence' or 'allow' for 'permit' would be cashiered. I was rather lucky because, after being suspected for the simplicity of my reports, I managed to use the word 'connote' once. My dear woman, my reputation was made. Generals came up and congratulated me personally, and I'm credibly informed that all the new military ciphers will include the word, which was just what was wanted to supplant 'mean,' a monosyllable that had been a blot on military correspondence for years." "Are you talking seriously?" Sylvia asked. "You can't really connote what you say." Hazlewood indicated the room where they were dining. "Which are the English diplomats?" he demanded. "That's perfectly easy to tell," she replied. "And why?" he went on. "Simply because they've made no concession to being in Nish at a moment of crisis. I invite you to regard my friend Harry Vereker. See how he defies any Horatian regret for lapsed years. Positively he is still at Oxford. Can't you hear above all this clatter of cosmopolitanism in a pigsty the suave insistency of his voice impressing upon you by its quality of immutable self-assurance that, whatever happens to the rest of the world, nothing vitally deformative ever happens to England?" "But what has the voice of a secretary to do with the military abuse of Latin derivations?"