Explore "Daily Traveling" by Joyce Kilmer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Call the custom of daily travel "commuting" and deliver it over to the whips of the scorner. The intransitive verb "to commute" is a barbarous thing; he who is called "commuter" is thereby rudely and ungrammatically taunted with journeying at reduced rates, with being (terrible thought! ) the recipient of a railway's charity.
It is lamentable that so picturesque a habit as daily railway travel should be thus misnamed. That it is a picturesque habit is perceived by anyone who takes the trouble to consider it scientifically, shutting resolutely from his mind the odium brought upon it by its odious name. Suppose, for instance, that you were to go into the tap-room of the Mermaid Tavern some winter evening during the reign of the, so to speak, Good Queen Bess. The venerable Mr. Alfred Noyes would lead you to the table always reserved for Messrs. Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. You would take from your pocket your commutation ticket, and, holding aloft that cabalistically inscribed oblong of colored cardboard, would sonorously declaim: