HALL-MARKED HOWLERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 83, 8 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

HALL-MARKED HOWLERS.

A LOCAL HARVESTING.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

(By H.F.C. )

"We have a teacher on this staff who does not enjoy howlers. She says she cannot see anything funny in a girl writing stupid things when her teacher has been at pains to tell her the facts. If I were not afraid of her ire I should advise her to see a doctor about it." .„ . , „ —Helen Sinclair in "Tales Out«of School."

Miss Sinclair is quite right. All normal people enjoy howlers, just as all nice "men lite murder stories. Some unbelievers will tell you that the best howlers are manufactured by brilliant adult scholars sitting up late at night with wet towels bound about their brows. To the epicure of these delights, however, there is nothing to beat the exquisite flavour of the genuine unforced article.

The examples given below are thus guaranteed. They represent the fine flower of a collection made over a period of years at a local school, for, as Mrs. Bennet assured Mr. Darcy abotit human nature, there is just as much of that going on here as in England. Things Not Generally Known. "The expression 'Hobson's 'Choice* came from Governor Hobson when he had to choose between Auckland and Wellington." "The first Archbishop of New Zealand was Bishop Overall." "Between England and Scotland are the Chevrolet Hills" (a whiff from the age of petrol!). "The masculine of goose is mongoose." "A mare's nest means a houseful of women." "The English and Scottish boarders were always fighting." "Franchise enables people who are over 21 to decide for themselves who or what shall be elected." "To out-Herod Herod means to be more watchful than Herod, who was known as Herod the Awake." Clergy and Teachers. There is a distinctly anti-clerical bias shown in the explanation of the phrase, "benefit of clergy": "In older days criminals were pardoned if they could read a psalm. This was how the clergy escaped being hanged." Both the clerical and teaching professions are obliquely attacked in the following note on Charlotte Bronte: "Her childhood was gloomy, her womanhood sad. She was the daughter of a clergyman, and afterwards became a teacher." "To encourage his subjects', love of adventure, King Arthur had a round table made to accommodate a number of diners." This seems a reflection upon the Camelot chef. Yet may it. not have been due to his enterprise that the hand which rose from the mere to grasp Excalibur was clothed in "white marmite"? The Classic Touch. It was not a schoolboy or girl who completed the "de mortuis" tag by "nil nisi bunkum," but there is an equally cruel note in the translation, "There is nothing eo good as being dead." . A reference to "Homo," the great Greek poet, is a happy, even if unintentional, solution of the Homeric problem, f .

Finally, truth and error were delightfully blended in the rendering of "I do not know" by "Ignoramus sum."-