THE WELL OF ENGLISH.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 38, 14 February 1924, Page 3

THE WELL OF ENGLISH.

ITS DEFILEMENT DENOUNCED. AT TEACHERS' CONFERENCE. (From OuV Special Correspondent.) LOXDOX, January -'. There is a breezy freshness about the attack made by Sir Henry Hadow, this year's president of the Educational Conference now going on, in his speecn "The Claims of Scholarship."' Himself a scholar, a writer and a music composer. Sir Henry has a cor* junction of gifts which makes him a."i excellent guide to those in his profession who seek to follow better path.-. He appealed to such to fight against the prevalent disea.-e—the general lack of scholarship. He asked for intellectual integrity, and intellectual sensitiveness. By intellectual integrity, he meant disdain of any pretence to know - ledge which one does not possess, and by intellectual sensitiveness that power of discriminating between intellectual nuances which in every field is the mark of the true scholar. A mixture of i:idolence and vanity i*. lie thought, hecoming the prevalent characteristic o. ; society of the present day—an anxiety not to take any intellectual trouble and an equal anxiety to take credit for the trouble that has not been taken. He quoted examples from everyday experience of what he called "sloppiness and inaccuracy of mind." and the extraordinary combination of that with the desire to be thought to know everything. Froude said of the examination system that it produced a "dilated omniscience." i~ir Henry thought the dilution was becoming oceanic. He gave amusing examples of ''commercial English. , " which was. Sir Henry said, helping towards the corruption am! dry-rot of the language. He complained of the use of substantives as adjective-. as in such newspappr headlines a.* "Election Returns"' and ""Reparations Expert." and rightly denounced the verb "to feature." He also spoke of the iiabit of using the most violent words and superlatives and pleaded for the abolition of '"super" in super-films, super-stars, and so on. Advertisers often made the mistake of shouting so loudly that people could not hear what they said. Sir Henry denounced the misuse of ■words of classical derivation. "Meticulous accuracy," which is used as if the adjective had something to do with exact -measuring. was meaningles-. "Meticulous" came from a Latin word meaning "timorous" or "timid." A habit of mind oftpn shown lately in our fiscal controversy came in for his castigation. There wa=. he said, a kind of shabby gentility in the use of phrases and the use of highly-coloured words instead of plain ones. "Slogan" was an example. It meant a war err consisting of the name of the chief or tribe, and yet we were told that the Conservative party went to tli? country ■nith the "slogan" that "Protective tariffs should be put on manufactured goods with a special preference for the colonies." He denounced, too. the journalistic, debasement of such words as "tragedy." "crusade" and "ordeal." The use of such -nords reminded him of the man in Swift who wore ruffles to conceal the fact that he had not got I a shirt. Suggesting remedies. Sir Henry ?a id that much more should be done in the schools in the teaching of exact accuracy of detail. He quoted the> case of the Rhodes scholar who answered the questions in a paper on Greek accidence by pure guess work and wrote iat the bottom, "I have a good general knowledge of grammar, but cannot manage these details."