Don’t ramble on. Make your point clearly
When reading letters and documents from the mid-eighteenth century one has to wonder if people spoke in the same manner as they wrote. If they did conversation must have been a trying exercise. In writing, the language is often convoluted, with overwrought sentences and flowery salutations. The Rules of Civility, themselves written in a style which frequently requires some head scratching before comprehension arrives, contain five specific exhortations against such language in conversation. In short, they demand that conversation be concise.
Rule 35 states, “Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.” It isn’t possible of course to hear a conversation between Washington and “Men of Business” but it is possible to read some of his many letters to his agents in London through which he ordered furnishings and supplies for his Mount Vernon home. When Washington ordered a new coach for his use from his London agent he wrote that he wanted a vehicle, “…in the newest taste…to be made of the best seasoned wood, and be by a celebrated workman.” Not what the modern ear or eye would consider concise perhaps, but clear enough. Regardless when the coach arrived it was soon evident that seasoned wood had not been used.
Washington avoided this Rule in another letter as he was preparing to leave the Presidency. After selling his team of coach horses to his longtime friend Mrs. Elizabeth Willing Powell, Washington wrote, “As the Coach would be lonesome without the horses – and the horses might repine for want of their Coach (having been wedded for seven years) you had better take both.” Not exactly a concise means of saying that he wanted to sell his coach too, but a demonstration that Washington was not a marble statue exhibiting a formal stiffness in all of his dealings.
Within this category is another Rule regarding speaking of matters of which one knows little. “In visiting the Sick, do not Presently Play the Physician if you be not Knowing therein.” Washington copied these rules as a teenager, without the knowledge that he would have little formal education beyond what today would be considered high school. Although in many areas he was better educated than the average high school graduate of today, he bore in mind his lack of formal education for the rest of his life, and likely found this Rule to be applied in discussing other trades besides medicine.
Washington understood through these Rules the need for what we would call giving someone their space, “…do not Lean, nor Look them full in the Face, nor approach to near them at lest Keep a full Pace from them.” Crowding too close in conversation was a distraction from the words being spoken and an act of aggression and many of Washington’s contemporaries and biographers wrote of his maintaining a space around him which few could enter. Whether this was a defense caused through his natural shyness or a deliberate application of the Rules of Civility is anybody’s guess.