Glamour – Sunday, July 14, 1940
There is a word in our language that has become very much over-worked of late, a word with broad connotations–we call it glamour. Many influences that leave their daily impression with us, and which are tolerated in the name of glamour, are giving our children distorted and false ideas of life.
Within the sober honesty of our hearts we know what we would like our children to become, and we know what the Lord, our Father in Heaven would like them to become; but we so often work at cross-purposes with our ideals and convictions. Collectively, if not individually, we thwart our own ends by allowing ourselves and our families to come under the daily influence of things that are contrary to wholesome reality. For a price, words, often regardless of their truth, are put into the mouths of celebrities, and public heroes and even some men of the professions, to introduce the impressionable members of society to become addicted to habits that are detrimental to health, to adopt standards that cannot be maintained, to want things they do not need and cannot afford, and to brood upon situations and embrace attitudes that cannot lead to happiness or normal living. And thus has glamour become a business, a profession, and an obsession, and it is time that our young people should know that these things are not life.
They are the cheapest counterfeits and have nothing in common with intrinsic or permanent values. If you will refer to your dictionaries you will find that deception is the essence of glamour. And so we say to our young friends – Don’t be fooled by the glamour girls and the glamour boys. Don’t be deceived by false standards and false practices, no matter how enticingly they are presented. Don’t flit about in quest of glamour, but reach for the real essence of life. It is smart to be beautiful and to be charming and to be accomplished and socially acceptable, but it is not smart to be a dupe – to be deceived by the parade of palaver. So much for the misuse and the misconception of the word “glamour.”
July 14, 1940
Broadcast Number 0,569