James Thurber Dialectal Journal

It was just a week to the day since Mr. Martin had decided to rub out Mrs. Ulgine Barrows. The term "rub out" pleased him because it suggested nothing more than the correction of an error--in this case an error of Mr. Fitweiler.(Thurber 3)

Sitting in his apartment, drinking a glass of milk, Mr. Martin reviewed his case against Mrs. Ulgine Barrows, as he had every night for seven nights. He began at the beginning. Her quacking voice and braying laugh had first profaned the halls of F & S on March 7, 1941(Thurber 6)

This he found difficult to do, in spite of entering an objection and sustaining it. The faults of the woman as a woman kept chattering on in his mind like an unruly witness.(Thurber 10)

"Are you lifting the oxcart out of the ditch? Are you tearing up the pea patch? Are you hollering down the rain barrel? Are you scraping around the bottom of the pickle barrel? Are you sitting in the catbird seat?"(Thurber 13)

Mr. Martin was still thinking about that red-letter day as he walked over to the Schrafft's on Fifth Avenue near Forty-Sixth Street. He got there, as he always did, at eight o'clock. He finished his dinner and the financial page of the Sun at a quarter to nine, as he always did. (Thurber 18)
The way Mr. Martin expressly did everything in a certain way and the way his thought process went with it was very interesting how it decently caught my attention.

Mr. Martin always drunk milk nobody ever saw him drink anything else and I wondered if there was a reason behind it doing that. It seem like he had a mental block against drinking anything but milk but as time passed he occasionally drunk some Gin.

Mr. Martin was getting stiffen with the difficultness of trying to figure out what the woman was referring to with the questions she was asking until a fellow employee explained it

This woman’s outrageous questions somehow didn’t make sense to the obvious mind and which case the all had to do with the game of baseball, Dodger baseball to be exact. Only one person knew what she was trying to say.

Mr. Martin earlier that day decide that the woman deserve the death sentence and was going to suit it to himself that she would get. So he started with a red letter day which means that he would do his usual routine but there was something different he was going to do.