“Conversation in North America has become a competitive exercise in which the first one to draw a breath is declared the listener.” Nathan Miller might be the onetime state senator from Virginia, or a number of other people. As Mr. Hill said of a tacked-on, apropos-of-not-much-except-I-liked-it quotation in one of my high school essays, “This is the evil of Bartlett’s.” Or in this case, the now long-forgotten Internet discovery of this witty bit from who knows whom.