EYE DECEIVES THE EAR

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 75, 28 March 1924, Page 6

EYE DECEIVES THE EAR

JOUSTING BRINGS DOWN MANY.

"This jowsting doesn't seem a very deadly sort of combat." said a man at the ringside at the Pageant. A bit further on one heard a young woman talking about the "jewsting." And the very word pageant itself also got horribly mutilated, even to sounding the g hard, as in "pagan." "Pag" (like badge) and "page" (like the page of a book) the g soft in each case, are both allowable according to the dictionary, but pageant pronounced on the same principle as Fagan is something quite new.

How is it that words out of the ordinary run are so terribly mutilated? You have only to listen to the mob's pronunciation of some of the classical names that are bestowed on racehorses to realise how superficial the exact knowledge of the man in the street must be. Of course, one great reason for this unfamiliarity with names whose spelling does not*always give the key to the pronunciation is the almost total neglect of oral teaching. We of to-day absorb almost all knowledge through the eye—which in pronunciation is so often totally unreliable. And in ordinary conversation the words used by the average person are extremely limited in number. Conversation is a dying art, and the subjects discussed in everyday talks are of the most simple nature. Words other than of the commonest kind are seldom used, and it is only in reading that the man in the street comes across them. He may have some justification for "jow" and

"jou" when he stumbles across the good old-fashioned word "jousting," and the last few days have shown us that people from whom more knowledge might have been expected, are surprised when they find that when knights were bold they neither jowstcd nor jousted, but just "justed."