Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1932. THE HABIT OF EXAGGERATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 125, 28 May 1932, Page 8

Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1932. THE HABIT OF EXAGGERATION.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

Cardinal Newman used to advise his hearers at Oxford to prune their words. This advice seems needed to-day, when the habit of exaggeration is so popular and so much in evidence. It is not naturally an English habit. The English are more prone to understatement than overstatement. Perhaps outside influences have been at work. An instance of this exaggeration was contained in a statement made by the secretary of the New Zealand Educational Institute when speaking on behalf of the institute, as part of a deputation representing , the combined Public Service organisations which protested against a further wage cut. He said that "there were others who had lost the remote allowance, which was an unjustifiable steal, the kind of thing that sent Charles Stuart to the block; not a word of justification could be said for it." As a matter of fact, the Canterbury Board of Education had a good many words to say in justification. It expressed the opinion that teachers should make careful, well-balanced statements. After all, should not a teacher set the first example in careful use of words'? Charles was not the only person who lost his head in this statement. Some time back a senior inspector referred to people who announced boldly that New Zealand had the best education system in the world. We have even been told that we have the best railway system in the world.

It has become a habit with some Parliamentary speakers to refer to any measure of which they do not approve as "the most monstrous outrage on public interest they have ever known in the course of a long Parliamentary career." Mr. Hoover described George Washington as the "founder of human liberty," as if there had been no liberty in the world before his birth. Mr. C. E. Montague gives an amusing , instance of overstatement in an extract from the "Morning Post" on Mr. Lloyd George. The paper said: "He left not this party, or that, but every political party, every respectable voter and, indeed, every thinking man in the world over, sick to the soul of 'Lloyd Georgeism , and all that it implied." On this, Mr. Montague makes the following comment: "You see —'every , political party — even his own special band of local dervishes. And 'every' respectable voter —even that churchwarden neighbour of yours who never, never would hear a word against Lloyd George, the 'man who won the war.' And every thinking man, 'the world over,' sick 'to the soul' —every pensive farmer in the rural wilds of Spain, every meditative friar in a rock monastery in Tibet—all, all convulsed by the one nauseating vision of Mr. Lloyd George."

In a similar vein the late Lord Birkenhead described the Bill for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales as "a Bill which shocked the conscience of every Church Communion in Europe." Did he seriously think that small Church communities in the Balkans or remote parts of Russia cared about what happened in Wales, or even knew where Wales was ? Of course he did not; he merely talked for effect. Everything now is "super," or the "finest in the world," or "the most outrageous in the whole history of the world," or "the most brutal insult ever flung in the face of the poor," or "a monstrous hash of crude and indigested proposals." Yet this very habit of exaggeration defeats its own end. Superlatives become corrfmon coin, and cease to impress. There are few more moving passages in history than the passage in which Thucydides tells of the disaster to the Athenian forces in Sicily. Hero there is no exaggeration, no straining after effect. He gains effect by the direct manner in which he piles incident on incident, fact on fact, till the cumulative effect is to bring the tragedy before the reader in all its naked horror. He shows his own emotion by his crabbed syntax, his evident restraint of style, and this is more effectual than any rhetorical effort could be. Virgil has his "pathetic, halffinished lines" that say more than any conscious word-weaving. Exaggeration was common in the silver age of Home, but the golden age pruned its words, and thus made literature that lives. |