MEDLEY OF HOWLERS.

Grey River Argus, 14 February 1929, Page 8

MEDLEY OF HOWLERS.

AN ENTERTAINING COLLECTION. GENUINE OR OTHERWISE. ”In turning over a collection of socalled “howlers” such as that gathered by Mr Cecil Hunt, says an English writer, one is nudged frequently by the suspicion that many of them are too good, too clever, to be true. On the other hand, some are mere padding. “Algebraical symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about” looks suspiciously like a parody of a well-known definition of metaphysics. “A pessimist is a man who is never happy unless he is miserable” is another which has faded. “Keats was to ;the Mediterranean.. by the poet, Sherry,” is poor stuff if genuine, and worse if invented, and “Tennyson wrote a poem called ‘Grave's Enery.' ” is puerile. The writer proceeds: “Mr Hunt should have blue-pencilled these. He could well have afforded to do so, for his collection is, on the whole, delightful; and we accept his assurance that most of hs examples have been sent to him by teachers who have vouched for their accuracy, and have quoted the school, form., and date of examination. If some of them be identified, no harm will be done; we can imagine how in years to come the boys who were guilty of these grotesque blunders will laugh over them as Heartily as their elders do now.

“But is it just to says all howlers are grotesque, or that they are all blunders?” it is asked. Some of these are philosophic gems with a sort of mental kink in expression, and not a few betray a subtle sense of humour. The boy in the geography class who wrote “The North Sea is also called the German Sea, but they don’t really think it is” was a bit of a wag, and his form fellow who defined “Etc.” as “A sign used to make believe you know more than you do' was not alto gether wrong. The foreign language class is prolific with blunders, though many of them are not senseless. “Infra dig” meaning in lodgings. ’ is a possible howler; “Joie de vivre—whisky—' is suspect; “C'est bon a traviller mais de n’est mon de pas |e f aire.—lt is good to travel but it is not good to pay the fare” is a sad reflection either upon the French master or upon the moral atmosphere of the school; and “Felo de se, ‘Found drowned’ ” —it is French for “fell in the sea,” sounds too much like jocular invention. Hr Hunt has classified his howlers. There is a section of “Biblical,’ in which many amusing blunders and bull-at-a-gate guesses are included. In one of them, concerning the Prayer Book, a quite accurate definition is ruined in the application—“An occa sionaal office is one that is not used regularly, such as the consecration of a cemetery or the churching of a bishop.” “A bishop without a diocese is called a suffragist.” is certainly not Biblical and “The primate is the wife of the Prime Minister,” is curious. Set to define a Protestant, a boy who have been taught to be cynical, writes: “A Protestant is anyone who is not a Catholic. Roman Catholics believe what the Pope speaks, but Protestants can believe what they like.” This, how ever, is not quite modern. Another is delightfully schoolboy like. Asked to explain what is meant by bearing false witness against one’s neighbour, he wrote, “It was when nobody did nothing., and somebody went and told of it,’ though the grammar is worse than the explanation. A good deal of fun may be got out of Mr Hunt’s “History and Politics” section. The howlers may or may not be genuine, but some of them have a sparkle of wit. “Where are the Kings of England crowned?” should have h(een an easy one to all the class, if they had been attentive. One can imagine the smile of the teacher when a boy replied—quite truly—‘‘On their heads.’ Another is even better—- ” Where was the Magna Carta signed? At the bottom.”

There is something obvious in the reply of the lad who declared that the three great estates of the Realm “are Windsor, Sandringham, and Balmoral,' and one can sense the joy of the youngster, who in answering the question “Why does true English history begin with the reign of Henry VII?” wrote: “Because up to this time it was all lies?” There e is something neat, if not original, in the statement that “ William the Conqueror landed in 1066 A.D.., and A.D., means after dark.’

It was John Morley who said that although everybody knows what an elephant is, it is not everybody who could describe one. The boy who said “An ellephant is a square animal with a tail in front and behind” had possibly read something like it some? where. He was a more original boy, perhaps fortified by experience, who said: “Anaemia is not having blood enough, but you have enough to bleed as much as anyone else if you cut ypur finger.” Realistic also the definition of a skeleton as “a man with his inside out and his outside off.” Some of the musical howlers are delicious. and some too crude even for schoolboy blundering. “Syncopation,' 1 wrote one boy, “is emphasis on a note that is not in the piece;” another calculated that “one semibreve equals two minions, and one crochet • four semi-skews,” and another, no doubt without intending to be personal, said “Contralto is a low sort of music that only ladies sing.” It was a maxim with Bacon and is still a modern theory, that science is but an image of truth. We are for ever learning, by shedding our ignorances and mistakes. Elementary science is to-day taught in our schools more thoroughly than ever, and many of these howlers are encouraging because, in spite of their absurdities, they show that schoolboys are taught to think. The boy who wrote that “Atoms are what Sir O. Lodge talks about on a crystal set” was at least observant, as also was the other student who, after the chemistry class wrote: “To remove air from a flask, fill the flask with water, tip the water out, and put the cork in quick.” “A circle is a round lin e -with no

kinks in it, joined up so as not to show where it began,” won, let it be hoped, a certain number of marks and there was more than a glimmering appreciation of facts in the reply. “A vacuum is nothing shut up in a box. They have a way of pumping out the air, then all the air and everything else is shut out, naturally they are able to shut in nothing, where the air was before.” From these selections from Mr Hunt’s entertaining collection it will be seen that a howler is not invariably what the dictionary calls ‘‘a glaring blunder.”