Drongo To You

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29401, 31 December 1960, Page 3

Drongo To You

(A Fourth Leader in “The Times’’} It an English judge, however learned in the law, were called a “drongo,” he might be excused for not knowing whether it was a compliment or an insult. If, as has just happened in the Australian Parliament, the word was used to describe judges as a class with “intellectual” tacked in front of it, his uncertainty would grow. But there was no doubt about it in Canberra, where the Attorney General had just been called across the floor of the House “a lout.” A drongo, so our Australian friends tell us, is little if anything better than a lout. He is a simpleton, a fool, and, above all, a “no hoper.” But whether that is to be taken to mean a pessimist or one of whom even his best friends despair seems to be uncertain. Probably the second, since, at its worst, drongo can—so we are told—go so far as to cover a person without merit, a dead-beat and one unworthy of confidence. Whether it all began as a libel on a bird is a question less open to doubt. There are in African and further eastern parts, variously scattered, drongoshrikes, drongo-cuckoos and the rackettailed drongo. Innocent though these creatures are of any human shortcomings, they have been made to suffer with the asses which have so much more sense than most men, the pig which is more clean and less greedy than some human beings we could all of us name and the trout which everybody will agree is among the noblest of living things. Why, in putting “drongo” into his sling, an assailant should wish to aim it at judges could be explained on the grounds that Bench and Bar (to say nothing of that invaluable band of men, the solicitors) are always popular targets. “The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” said Dick the Butcher to Jack Cade, as students who have soldiered on as far as the second part of “Henry VI” will remember.

But lawyers are by no means solitary sufferers. The harshest things have traditionally been said about doctors, stockbrokers, income tax men, plumbers, journalists, and other indispensable citizens. Indeed, it is hard to think of any profession or calling that has escaped scot-free from the scorpion or at least the switch of the satirist Is it that delight in coming across such tempting missiles as “drongo” is an incitement to finding someone to throw them at? Do not let us forget the Cambridge mathematician who took on bnd floored a bargee, countering that master of Billingsgate’s first ripple of obscenity with “Isosceles triangle to you, my man,” and finishing by sending him down for a count of 10 by scornfully denouncing him as “the square on the hypotenuse of a left-angled triangle.” For him, drongo would have been mere lightweight stuff.

There is no shortage of books about fruit-growing. Somewhere, the searcher will find what he wants to know, though perhaps at the expense of many hours’ searching. Edward Hyams, who is a practical fruitgrower as well as a successful novelist, has detosed a short cut to discovery of tne facts about fruit-growing. He has collected, collated, and distilled information, and he presents it in alphabetical order in the FRUITGROWERS’ ENCYCLOPAEDIA, published by Odhams. The subject on which expert advice is most frequently sought—the identification and treatment of pests and diseases—is excellently treated in a pictorial section of large, clear photographs. Throughout the book, advice on growing, pruning, etc, is supplemented by line illustrations.