Abraham Lincoln in his famous letter to his son's teacher asks the teacher to teach his son the secret of quiet laughter. Is this expression an oxymoron (like deafening silence)?
Learn English – What does ‘quiet laughter’ refer to
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Best Answer
The famous letter that Abraham Lincoln didn't write
According to an online article by Thomas F. Schwartz, "Lincoln Never Said That," on the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency website, the supposed letter from Lincoln to his son's teacher is not by Lincoln at all. It is the fourth of ten examples Schwartz cites of quotations misattributed to Lincoln:
Although Schwartz doesn't speculate about who wrote the supposed letter and when, the results of a Google Search for specific phrases from the bogus letter make pretty clear who the author was.
A Google Books search for the phrase "secret of quiet laughter" produces 40 or so unique matches— all of them variants of the "Teach him [this, that, and the other thing]" wording that Schwartz quotes in his article. Most of the matches are from the past couple of decades, and many are from India. A typical example is A. B. Rao, Business Ethics and Professional Values (New Delhi, 2006), which introduces the supposed letter as follows:
A few versions of the supposed letter go back to 1969 and 1970. But one goes back to 1958, and it isn't presented in the form of a letter to someone, but rather in the form of a speech to a meeting of the Colorado Education Association by its incoming president. The journal in which the speech appears is visible only as a snippet view, so it takes some time to piece together the whole speech. For that reason, I'm going to spare any other interested party the effort by reproducing the relevant part of the speech in full. From a speech by Robert A. Morton to the Colorado Education Association, published in Colorado School Journal, volume 74 (1958) [combined snippets]:
It's a nice speech, and it's ten years older than the next-oldest article that uses similar language in a Google Books search—but it isn't by Abraham Lincoln.
What is "the secret of quiet laughter"?
At this point I will assume that you are still interested in what the author meant by "the secret of quiet laughter," even after learning that the author is Robert A. Morton and not Abraham Lincoln.
According to Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate (2003), the only nonarchaic meaning of the word laughter has an essential connection to sound:
This definition suggests that "silent laughter" would indeed be an oxymoron, in the same sense that "deafening silence" is. But MW's definition of "a sound of laughing" doesn't imply a specific minimum volume, and therefore a quiet but audible laugh would not be a contradiction in terms, even under the dictionary's standard.
In my view, "quiet laughter" has much in common with the idea as "laughing to oneself." The crucial idea here is that you find something amusing, and you experience the full humor of it, but without making a display of your mirth or distracting others or (in some instances) hurting their feelings or enraging them. Once you've learned the secret of internalized laughter—or quiet laughter—it doesn't much matter whether you laugh aloud, laugh softly, or no make sound at all. The crucial thing is that you enjoy all the pleasure of a good laugh in the privacy of your own mind.
In this regard it's worth noting that Merriam-Webster's entry for the intransitive verb laugh (as opposed to its entry for the noun laughter) includes a number of soundless options:
Definitions 1a and 2a of laugh clearly describe verb counterparts of MW's definition of laughter; and it seems to me that definitions 1b and 1c of laugh make good counterparts to "quiet laughter."