RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 188, 8 May 1934, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events

(By

Kickshaws.)

Television, it is stated, is lurking round the corner. Experts, so it seems, are already looking into It.

After a woman is 30, says a dress designer, she has reached an age of permanence. This is also true about her age.

Some gates at the Oval have been dedicated to Hobbs in memory of his prowess at cricket. Batsmen might well consider a pair of spectacles or a nest of duck’s eggs as a suitable reminder of Larwood.

Judging by reports from all over New Zealand, *the clerk of the ■ weather did his best to give us a wet week-end.f Certainly there must have been a hint of wetness in the 12in. of rain that descended in some places in the South Island. The few inches that fell over the week-end in Wellington are nothing compared with this effort. In the same way the 12in. of rain that fell in the South Island sinks into insignificance when compared with the rainfall in countries where it really knows howto rain. One’ can be thankful, for instance, that the Philippines . are not nearer New Zealand than they are. We may have our West Coast, but the wettest weather on the West Coast seems tolerably dry compared with the 46in. of rain that has been known to fall at Bagino in the Philippines in 24 hours, Queensland is another district where it really knows how to rain. There are some parts of that State where it is the habit to measure rainfall by the yard. Three or four years ago the fall at a place called Tully amounted to no less than four yards of rain in a fortnight.

There are places here where the yardstick would appear to be a suitable scale for rain. For instance, eight yards of rain in the year is not unheard of in some parts of the South Island. In the North Island wet weather is usually more restrained. Nevertheless, on occasion it would rain by the yard if, so to speak, it only kept it up long enough. Not many months ago the best part of a foot of rain fell in not much over 24 hours in the Tongariro area. In the vicinity of Napier it has been known to rain for 24 hours at the rate of nearly an inch an hour. lu fact, for short spurts during this “shower” water came out of the sky at the rate of four inches an hour. Similar downpours have been recorded unofficially in the Tararuas. Possibly for short periods the four inches that fell in some places in Queensland in 45 minutes beats all New Zealand records for sharp showers. Nevertheless, there is an unofficial record for the North Island of New Zealand of half an inch of rain in three drenching minutes.

Perhaps if is just as well that Hobbs was named Hobbs and not Smith, because if he had been he would have had to share those gates that have been named after him with half a million other Smiths. So far- as can be discovered these gates are all that will go down into the future in memory of Hobbs. In the case of other cricketers this is not the case. Bradman may not have had any gates to his credit, barring the audience type, but fond fathers have already ensured that his name will always lie with us by naming their offspring Bradman. Indeed after the last visit'of the Australians to England several infants were given Bradman as their Christian name. One or two were christened Woodfull aud Fairfax. Let us hope that these youngsters grow up to their Christian names. It may be true that Smith is a common name but it seems curious that no great cricketer has arisen with that name. In fact in other walks of life the Smiths have not done too well. No British Prime Minister has been named Smith. No New Zealand Prime Minister or Australian has honoured the Smith family with fame. Perhaps successful” Smiths change their name to Smythe, or Smethwick or Pryzsmlymski. » ♦ ♦

Perhaps it is not surprising that there are such huge armies of people with the same name when one realises the haphazard manner in which we got our names. The earliest names indicated not an individual but a group of individuals. As the race became more civilised we dropped names culled from Nature such as snake, raven, etc., and adopted names that referred to our trade. In this way arose, among others, the great army of Smiths, the lesser army of Sadlers, the Fowlers and the Cartwrights. Other families got their names from sonre peculiarity in the first of the family. Hence the Longs, the Shorts, the Blacks and the Whites. A genealogist who took the trouble to analyse the first 30,000 names in the London Directory found that 11,000 were place names, or corruptions of place names. Nearly 3,000 were occupation names, 8,000 baptismal names, 3,000 nicknames, and 2,000 were official names such as Steward, Lord, Priest and the like. The rest were made up of foreign names and names that had become so corrupted it was impossible to decide their origin. Will the present age give us a new series of occupational names such as Mr. Radio, Mr. Car, Mr. Aerobat and Mrs. Shorthand?

“Formosa” writes: “I was looking through the index of a Bible recently. I came across the word Tekoa. The New Zealand Shipping Company had a steamer of that name, and I had always thought It was a Maori word, so I was puzzled as to how it came in the Bible. Also Timnru is, I presume, a Maori word. Kitano Marti (a steamer) Is Japanese, and I have seen the ending ‘inaru’ in the Bible. How is ‘maru’ connected with three different languages?”

“Formosa’s” problem about the Tekoa was referred to the language experts at Victoria University College. Professor H. Mackenzie has kindly replied as follows: —"Many words (approximately the same in form or spelling) are found in languages that have no known philological (or historical) connection with one another. When the meanings are the same, or cognate, we naturally suspect that there is some philological (or historical) connection, but there need not be. Many such words must lie due to pure coincidence. That ‘maru’ should suggest something connected with the sea is most natural and simple. The Latin ‘mare’ and numerous cognate words in other languages mean the sea. or something connected with the sea. and such a word could obtain a wide geographical ‘circulation’ from the seamen of the earliest times. The Gaelic for sea is ‘muir.’ and ‘mara’ in Gaelic means ‘of the sea’ (marine almost). ‘Mariclie’ is a seafarer (sailor). The names ‘Maori’ and ‘Moriori’ seem, to me. to have a seafaring implication, but may not. I understand that not a few words in Maori can be traced with confidence to Indo-European sources. If that Is so, we need never be greatly surprised at finding coincidences such as ‘Formosa’ has mentioned.”