Sally
A brief, spirited flight of wit — a remark that sallies out from the flow of talk and returns.
A sally, in its rhetorical sense, is a lively excursion of wit or fancy — a remark that leaves the ordinary course of conversation, makes a small brilliant loop, and returns. The word borrows the military image of a sally: a sudden dash out of a fortified position and back again. Eighteenth-century English writers, especially Boswell on Johnson, use 'sally' constantly to describe the sort of remark that lit up a dinner table.
The form sits between the quip and the aphorism. Unlike a quip, a sally is expected to be a little longer, a little more elaborate — a small performance rather than a single flash. Unlike an aphorism, it does not claim general truth; it claims only the freshness of the moment.
Because sallies are conversational, most are lost as they are made. The ones that survive do so because a listener wrote them down soon after, which is why almost all of Johnson's sallies reach us through Boswell rather than through Johnson. The debt of the modern quotation collection to attentive listeners is nowhere clearer than in this category.
Common mistake: mistaking a prepared witticism, delivered as if spontaneous, for a sally. The distinction matters historically — a sally is precisely the wit that could not have been prepared, because it depends on what has just been said in the room.
“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Keep reading the glossary
A brief, witty remark — sharper than an observation, lighter than an argument.
A clever, often spontaneous remark that delivers humour through verbal ingenuity.
A neatly turned witty remark — literally a 'good word' in French.
A short, weighty statement of general truth used to close or crown a passage of argument.