[Homer_J_Simpson]

The Christmas Gift – 1
Christmas-Day, 1860 – 2
Editorials – 3
The Lounger – 3
The Verge of the Pit – 3-5
Humors of the Day – 5
A Broad Hint about the Holidays – 5
The Forts and Harbor of Charleston, South Carolina – 6, 8
Burning of the Steamer “John P. King” – 7-8
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, Ch. IX-X – 8-10
A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance, by Charles Lever. Ch. XXX – 10-11
Domestic Intelligence – 11
Christmas Chimes at Trinity Church, New York – 12
Foreign News – 13
A Message from the Sea-Dickens’s Christmas Story – 13-20

[BroJoeK]

"Editorials – 3"

I love, love the complaints on page 3 about "Abused Words".
Even in 1860, amid all their other troubles, people understood that some words were being used & abused in unseemly ways.

Exibit A: "Commencement" -- a fancy word for "begin" and which has now been relegated, mostly, to scholarly events such as graduations.
Somehow it also ended up in military-speak, as in: "commence firing".

Exibit B: "rupture" versus "disrupt" -- I never thought about those being the same thing and today "disrupt" is far more often used...

So I'm glad to see somebody raised objections at the time, though arguably it didn't help. ;-)