THRILLS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 78, 2 April 1928, Page 6

THRILLS.

Do you notice how every little while everybody gets a new adjective—no, that is not quite it— how everybody, except fclie very precise and proper, makes a special pet of the same adjective? Just now it appears to be ••thrilling"—the adjective of popular taste. It goes through all its grammatical phases. "My dear, I was positively thrilled!" and how the word lends itself to exaggerated emphasis. "So-and-so's hat was just too thrilling for words." "You can't think what a thrill I got when you said for tho week-end." And so it goes on till a word which really should mean something wonderful leaves you quite cold. "Absolutely" was a tiresome ending to every sentence not long ago. and trivial conversation was made ridiculous by the frequent use of this dignified word of finality. "Right-o" began with the youngsters, but is now terribly universal and it seems as though it is not to' be ousted by new expressions. "Right-o" is so easy to say in these days of flurry and scurry. The Englishsounding ery good," or the usual "Very "well" is lost in "riaht-o."

We colonials are accused of interlarding "My word' much too often in ordinary conversation. I know, for my part, I was quite startled to hear how one of the official radio uncles used the expression in his talk to the children a little time ago. Another foolish-sounding adjective just here occurs to me—"sublime." That word had quite a long season and often it prefaced "idiot," and so if you were affectionately dubbed a "sublime idiot' you were not at all ruffled; you- knew it was tho jargon of the day. It is fatally easy to absorb another person's pet adjective, quite against your will. A woman I kTiow had "devastating," of all words, thrust upon her unwilling brain; it made her quite unhappy and tore up many of her speeches by obtruding at odd times, she, of course, poking it back and interrupting herself again and again. "Perfectly" was done to death about the same time as it was fashionable to say "Common or garden." Says the flapper at the 'phone, "You interrupted me in the middle of a perfectly good ice," not the "common or garden" kind, but a "perfectly good one." And when she says she had a "perfectly good" flounder for lunch that does not mean that she usually lunchee off bad fish. —G. EDITH BURTON.