Explore "Are you a Bromide?" by Gelett Burgess on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The terms "Bromide" and "Sulphite" as applied to psychological rather than chemical analysis have already become, among the _illuminati_, so widely adopted that these denominations now stand in considerable danger of being weakened in significance through a too careless use. The adjective "bromidic" is at present adopted as a general vehicle, a common carrier for the thoughtless damnation of the Philistine. The time has come to formulate, authoritatively, the precise scope of intellect which such distinctions suggest and to define the shorthand of conversation which their use has made practicable. The rapid spread of the theory, traveling from Sulphite to Sulphite, like the spark of a pyrotechnic set-piece, till the thinking world has been over-violently illuminated, has obscured its genesis and diverted attention from the simplicity and force of its fundamental principles.
[1] In this, its progress has been like that of slang, which, gaining in popularity, must inevitably decrease in aptness and definiteness.