CULTURED ENGLISH

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 10

CULTURED ENGLISH

DAILY CONVERSATION

LORD BLEDISLOE'S ADVICE

The importance of careful use of tho English language in daily conversation was a theme upon which his Excellency tho Governor-General (Lord Bledisloe) addressed tho girls of Marsden School, at the prize-giving yesterday afternoon. His Excellency stressed the desirability of avoiding the use of exaggerated language or slang. "Among other school subjects you aro taught cultured English," said his Excellency to the girls. "To what extent are you using it now, and propose to use it in after life? There is something vacuous, unintelligent, and disproportionate about the conventional phraseology of so many young women who claim social superiority or fashionablo distinction. Such words as 'amazing,' 'marvellous,1! and 'colossal' on the ono hand, and 'awful,' 'terrible,', and 'devastating' on the other, are frequently on their tongues in reference to very ordinary events and still more ordinary individuals, and their constant use tends to breed, through exaggeration, inaccuracy and insincerity in their utterers and lack of conviction in their hearers. Ours is a beautiful language, rich in words and phrases applicable to all the tones and semitones, tho crescendos, diminuendos, the chords, and arpeggios of human experience. Can we not use it more carefully in our daily conversation? There is nothing old-fashioned or 'Early Victorian' in clinging to the cultural phraseology of the Bible, o-f Shakesspeare, of Sir AValter Scott, or of Edmund Burke. You may say, when inclined to use exaggerated language, or slang, 'Well, other girls do it, and why not-jvef' Surely tho answer is 'Because Marsden School is a place of higher education provided for the needs of those who should point tho way in the matter of culture and refinement to the less fortunate sections of the population, and the use of such words is a poor tribute to the intellectual equipment with which it lias so generously provided you.' I should like to see a money box provided in every leading sccondaiy school and in the home of every well-educated family in this Dominion into which a penny would be placed for some charitable object every time that a member of the, household used a word of flagrant exaggeration or slang. "Impetuosity of language is often as unconvincing as its inappropriateness. There is an old traditional prayer which runs, 'Let Divine wisdom guard our lives and teach us how and when to speak and when to be silent.' Truth coupled with tolerance breeds prudence in word and deed and that reserve force which is indicative of. character and which calls forth confidence in the leaders of mankind, especially in times of crisis and adversity. But entire silence ia often golden. Truth-is sometimes best unspoken. To blurt it out in anger and impetuosity or in vain arrogance may be the- height of unwisdom and the negation of that charity which we place first among the Christian virtues."