QUEER WORDS MADE BY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19239, 1 August 1924, Page 5

QUEER WORDS MADE BY

The subject of the double words which some particularly observant boys and girls are able to invent with extraordinary facility does not appear to have received the attention it deserves, perhaps because tire juvenile power of creating compound wards is by no means a usual gift. But it exists.

I have in mind a little fellow of my acquaintance, whose parents decided _ to keep their boy from beginning the serious work of learning until he was seven—the age he has just reached. His parents no doubt acted very wisely, far the powers of observation of this seven-year-old axe exceptional. He shows them by his compounds. The guard of a railway train, for instance, he calls “train-master.” A sailor is a “shipman.” The chimney-pot is the “smokehole,” while a boot polishing brush is a ‘'boot-shiner.” He has also a remarkable tendency to describe an object by an active term. Thus, an express train is a “rusher,” a ladder is a “climber,” and an aeroplane is a “flyer.” * * • * These conceptions of the untrained child-mind are strangely hkc those of our Saxon forefathers. Old English was peculiarly rich in compounds and in descriptive words. It was an objective rather than a subjective language, yet this little friend of mine unconsciously talks in the style of our old mother tongue. In his compounds it is the most striking object that is uppermost in his mind —the train, the ship, the smoke; not the guard, or the sailor, or the chimneypot. Without knowing it he is displaying one of the characteristics of Old English. Can it be that the primitive characteristics of his far-off ancestors crop out when the mind of the unschooled boy begins to function actively and independently, or must we conclude that intellectually the men who spoke Old English were only children of a larger growth?