For a week or so, Freda paid very little attention to me. When I begged for more work to do, she tossed me a few minor bits of copy to write. "Lay off the cat-licked adjectives," she said. "In home-furnishings copy, you have to give facts. If you're selling a housewife on the idea of buying a mattress and springs at thirty-nine-ninety-five, you have to tell her what percentage is horsehair and what's hog, and how the coils are tied, and whether the springs are open or inner."

My blank look betrayed me.

"But everybody knows the difference between open and inner springs," Freda said. "You've made a bed, haven't you?"

I said apologetically that I'd never noticed the springs. Freda quizzed me more and more incredulously, and soon she knew the sum of my home-furnishings knowledge: Mahogany is reddish brown. Oriental rugs have designs on them and broadloom doesn't. A long stuffed thing is a sofa.

--from "Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs" (1951)