Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, With a Father and Child on an Early 20th-Century Road Trip)

“Are you lost daddy? I arsked tenderly.
 
"Shut up he explained.” —American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), “The Young Immigrunts,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 31, 1920, reprinted in Ring Lardner: Stories and Other Writings, edited by Ian Frazier (2013)
 
I don’t know if, as an American, you’ve heard of, let alone read, The Young Visiters, a 1919 novella written by an Englishwoman, Daisy Ashford, when she reportedly was only nine years old.
 
One writer who looked at it dubiously was Ring Lardner, who parodied it in The Young Immigrunts—first as a long magazine article, then as a stand-alone book.
 
I suspect, even if you’re unaware of the targets of Lardner’s satire, that you will laugh like mad at his consistently surprising and hilarious use of American slang.