The People’s Songoog

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30901, 6 November 1965, Page 5

The People’s Songoog

insults by throwing the main power switch and racing through the plant, calling out the workers. Many of them stayed outside the gates of the plant to tell the day shift of the strike. As the latter arrived, the crowd grew to 250. At 7.30 a.m. Sheriff Adkins panicked and fired a tear-gas shell into the crowd. John Jonas, a 57-year-old crippled man, struck at the sheriff with his cane and was shot immediately by a deputy. The crowd broke and fled and the deputies fired indiscriminately at them, hitting more than 20. Six died, all shot in the back. Baldwin made his attitude to the troubles clear in an interview a couple of days later. On October 4, 1929, the Ashville “Citizen” quoted him as saying: “I understand 60 or 75 shots were fired in Wednesday’s fight. If this is true, there are 30 or 35 of the bullets accounted for. I think the officers are damned good marksmen. If I ever organise an army they can have jobs with me. I read that the death of each soldier in the World War consumed more than five tons of lead. Here we have less than five pounds and these casualties. A good average, I call it.” The textile workers buried their dead that same day. Ministers from Marion and the neighbouring towns would not go near the dead and a stranger came from another state to conduct the funeral. During the service an old preacher from the North Carolina mountains knelt and prayed: “Dear God, what would your Jesus do If He were to come to Carolina?"

Flax." Phormium tenax, which promised for • time to be a most important commercial product, but its fibre has now been superseded by others. It attractea attention from the early navigators; it should, of course, have been called hemp,- not flax. It was. indeed, useful to the ancient Maori and one wonders what they would have done without it

1 was amused some 50 yean ago when a correspondent of the local press suggested that we should prohibit the export of its seed and keep it to ourselves; actually the early French navigators brought the seed to Fnnce and it was in cultivation near Bordeaux before 1800. It was taken to St Helena and cultivated for export but I do not know whether it has maintained its position there. Frequently the pretty little toad-flax, Linaria cymbaleria, is quite a troublesome weed in Auckland gardens, but the Christchurch climate is apparently too dry for it; still I see it here grown in hanging baskets. You never know where you may see New Zealand flax; anywhere in the Western counties of England, the Isle of Wight, the Channel Islands and so on.

Visiting the Capitol at Rome and paying my respects to the she-wolf kept there as a memorial to Romulus and Remus, I was amused to find that whenever she looks out of the back door of her cage all she can see is a fine large plant of Phormium tenax.

Raspberry “RASPBERRY,” a nice fruit 1 and a nasty noise. The raspberry grows wild as well as being cultivated and is a native of Europe and Russian Asia. Scientifically it is Rubus Idaeus, the Idean Bramble. It acquired this name among the ancients and Pliny says it was so named because it is the only plant of that class growing on Mount Ida. A Rubus or Bramble is a member of the great Rose family and Rubus is a very big genus. England has five species (including the blackberry); so has New Zealand (we call them Lawyers.) A lawyer is a very old nickname for the bramble or briar, so called according to an Elizabethan playwright because once they get hold of you they don’t easily let go. The origin of the name “raspberry” is a puzzle. It appears first in 1532, as “raspis," later “berry” was added, but there is no explanation of this “raspis.” When I say "no explanation" I mean no tenable one, for the older etymologists were not so easily baffled. Bailey, 1724, makes a mad stab at it and says its outside is “rough like a rasp." The pronunciation of “raspberry” has caused disagreements. The “sp” may be pronounced as “ss” or “z.” Modern authorities prescribe razberry with long “a” of course. The eighteenth century lexicographers disagreed. “Rassberry” was favoured by Sheridan, 1780, Walker, 1791, and as late as 1827 by Jamison. Daniel Jones allows “rassberry” as alternative to the standard raz—. The “nasty noise” raspberry is dated by Oxford from 1915. It is supposed to be of theatrical origin. Oxford defines it as a sound or manifestation of dislike, contempt, disapproval or dismissal. As to its further etymology, it were well not to inquire.