Carl L. Becker

Carl Lotus Becker was one of the most stylish American historians of his generation, and the phrase that escaped him is a fair sample of the prose. He taught at the University of Kansas for fourteen years before moving to Cornell, where he spent the rest of his career. His best-known book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), is still read — and it is where he used the same phrase a second time, about words “permitted to slip off the tongue or the pen without fear and without research.”