Vocabularies “Appalling”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31923, 26 February 1969, Page 3

Vocabularies “Appalling”

Children today were impoverished in the vocabulary they learned at school, Dr John L. Moffat said at a meeting of the Christchurch Federated Business and Professional Women’s Club on Monday evening.

“Many people do not understand basic grammar. I have been appalled when some have come to me with an M.A. in English but with no knowledge of grammar,” he said. Dr Moffat, the principal lecturer in language at the secondary department of Christchurch Teachers’ College, was talking about “Communication, with reference to tech-' nology,” the subject chosen by the International Federation of Business and Professional Women for study during the year. “Dreadful mutilations” could be made in a message even by a misplaced apostrophe, he said. “For a proper communication, there must be not only a sender, but a message and a receiver. I do not think an act of communication is complete then until the sender has received acknowledgement that the person at the other end has his message. Four Features “All forms of communication must have these four features—sender, message, receiver, acknowledgement; absence of any one results in a break-down in communication,” said Dr Moffat

Such break-downs occurred far too often, especially in family life. A husband, for example, might fail to pass comment on his wife’s new dress or hair style. The second cause of failure could be that the message was incomprehensible, ambiguous or misunderstood. Failure in vocabulary, such as making a wrong choice of word, or lack of knowledge of grammar, often resulted in this. It was necessary that the sender and receiver should possess the same idiom, other-, wise a communication could be ambiguous, said Dr Moffat. Break-down in communication could occur, too, if the message sent was not reor if the message was received but not acknowledged. Tendency To Decline Tracing civilisation through (he golden, silver, bronze, and iron ages to the technological age, Dr Moffat said there was a tendency in human affairs to decline.

“From the age of faith in the Middle Ages, when Christendom was interpreted the same in all countries, we fell to the intellectual and then to the romantic age, which was based on feelings. We are very unfortunate to be living now in a materialistic age. “My great fear is that, in dealing with such physical things, we will overlook the facts of heart and spirit.” It had been predicted, he said, that the next age would be religious, and the cycle would start all over again.