Of all cold words of tongue or pen
The worst are these: “I knew him when—”

Guiterman’s couplet skewers a familiar social reflex: the chilly, self-elevating remark made when someone becomes famous—“I knew him when—.” The speaker implies privileged access to the person’s earlier, lesser-known self, often to diminish the subject’s present success or to claim reflected importance. By calling such words the “worst” among “cold words of tongue or pen,” the poem frames the phrase as a subtle form of envy and belittlement, a way of withholding generosity toward achievement. The wit lies in its compression: a commonplace fragment of speech becomes a moral diagnosis of small-mindedness.