SWEETENING THE PILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16621, 18 August 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

SWEETENING THE PILL.

MISUSE OF WORDS. BY FRANK.' MORTON. *? It is queer that, beset about as we are by all the terrors of war, people generally should still be so afraid of plain English. We shrink from language that is genuinely expressive and forthright, and lose ourselves in a muddle of circumlocutions. In Australia just now, where the voluntary system is on its " final" tria.l for the fifth time-, recruiting officers are begging' everybody not to say a word about conscription. lou may say, " If this final trial fails it will become obvious that something must be done." Or you may even hint that compulsory service may become necessary. But you must not mention conscription, because conscription is a bogey word. And so it is right through. We go blinking and doddering on. School Influence.

It wouldn't matter so much, but when one begins to take liberties with the language there is no saying where the insolence may end. I went through a file of Figaro just now, and was unable to discover a solitary instance of a word misused or misapplied, or to detect a single example of flagrantly bad French. That is because the Frenchman has formed the admirable habit of always using for preference the word that most nicely and adequately expresses his full meaning. Scarcely one Englishman in six can write a decent letter, but scarcely onu Frenchman in sixty can't. One will pick up a note hastily scribbled by a French commercial man, and find the punctuation excellent, and every accent mark in its place. There must be a reason for this striking difference, and the reason is to be found in the fact that the Englishman, and especially the Englishman of the Dominions, has no scruples of conscience to deter him from mishandling the loveliest language in the world. He is taught by inference at school that it is never desir-. able to write the exact truth, when he can by any means write round it. He is taught what? his preceptors are pleased to call " composition"—an abomination. The boy s natural instinct is to write exactly what he wants to say, and to write it as simply as possible; but composition has no such end in view. I receive many things written by budding literary aspirants still at school, and it is pathetic, sometimes it is almost maddening, to see how the smear and slime of composition is all over them. The poor little beggars write with vulgar affected flourishes of phrase, and generally with the very slightest sense of the meaning and value of words. When it comes to " perspicuity" or " perspicacity" they make a wild shot that almost invariably results in a miss. They always write that they are " averse to" something, from which, in point of fact, they are averse. And it is all because, in the eyes of the deluded teachers of youth, the simple English tongue of our forbears is no longer quite respectable.

Afraid of the Word " Conscription." This deplorable current trick of disfiguring the language as a means of sweetening th.6 pill has done more to destroy efficiency in Australia, as to the war, than anything else has done. We should have had compulsory military service—the only sane and honest way, in a democracy ago, had it not. .been that Mr. W. M. Hughes was afraid of the word conscription. Mr. Hughes is a fubby mediocrity, astonishingly glib; a man who for a little while enjoyed the most preposterously inflated reputation in the world. All his life he had been what you call a Labour man, and the professional politician of the Labour section is a man who puts politics before duty and before God. Mr. Hughes won certain fame in England by saying everything he thought would " go'" but when he returned to Australia he lost a big chance bv refraining from doing what he knew to be right, because he thought that to do right would lose him political popularity. No statesman could ever behave like that. The Reporter and the Speaker.

Our careless misuse of English has other had effects. It leaves open an easy avenue of escape for the coward and the liar, the hypocrite and the trickster." When any man is reported to have said something idiotic or offensive, he is enabled to swear that he didn't say that at all: that he merely said something that sounded like it, but was quite different in intention. There is only one way of determining what a man did say, and that is by consulting a shorthand note s 'of his utterance ; a note taken by a capable reporter. One cannot trust one's memory in such a matter: least of all can one trust the memory of the man who said the thing. But the reporter. trained to hear exactly, will often find, his memory at fault when lie puts it to the test of his notes. And yet, the amateur speaker will set himself up against the record made by an expert. More amazing still : newspapers have been known to accept the mere word of a speaker against the testimony of clear notes taken by members of their own staffs. This I take to be the unpardonable sin against the holy spirit of good journalism. English UndeSled. There is urgent need for a new association altogether, a society of men/who shall determine that they will stSfid at all hazards and in all circumstances for plain and simple English undefiled. This society would explore every nook and comer of our peerless English treasury of words. It would bring back into currency the host of good words now lying in the vaults of neglect. It would piously pillory every flagrant example of a good work misused, or a bad word made to do ineffective duty for a good one. It would work earnestly to restore to our young people a sense of the splendour of their heritage. It would insist that no book written in bad English can by any possibility be a good book, and that no book written in good English can be altogether bad. It would bo the avowed enemy of all verbal subterfuge and cant. It would somehow , come upon and establish the obvious truth that the man who speaks in sloppy English must have his brain-pan full of sloppy thought. The clear thought always finds clear expression, as when a man says, " I am hungry;" or a woman, "I am afraid of cows." Political Speeches. If you want to learn how sloppily many public men think, consult any hard-driven reporter. For the speeches you see re. ported in the newspapers ate very seldom indeed the speeches as they were actually delivered. Thev are the speeches as they appear when they have been vastly improved and revised by modest experts in the newspaper offices. T took a note of a public man in New Zealand once, and for a long time afterwards kept it by me as a curiosity. In one awful sentence, yards long, there were nineteen grossly misused words, four false quotations, and eleven unfinished parentheses. If y-ou think thit this case is unique you do not know your public men. By long misuse the perceptions of audiences have become hopelessly dulled in many cases. I once heard a man make a speech about finance. He was in a very tight corner, and any exact and truthful statement would have made a political bankrupt of him. So he hurled a chaotic horde of figures at his audience. The figures had no true relation to each other. But the man spoke two hundred words a minute, and never paused to take breath. The audience, perfectly unable to follow him. applauded violently and often. And when the man sat down, not having made one truly coherent or illuminating statement, he had somehow managed to save the situation. That is, I suppose, a great gift. Matter of taste.