PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20290, 24 December 1927, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year. Tliis time-worn jingle, returning year by year with the regularity of Christmas itself, is attributed by the quotation dictionaries to Thomas Tussor, of the year 1550 or thereabouts. Thomas Tussor, an obscurity of the year 1550! —it would be useless to pick him out a Christmas card, though there arc Christmas cards that carry his rhyme. We may admit that Christmas is precisely the time for recalling things and persons that are old, for saying, if we can, as someone says in a Goldsmith play, “ I love everything that is old, — old'friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.” But these are indoor loves and likings, possible in winter and rough weather, when from near and far kinsfolk gather to play and make good cheer round the domestic hearth. The conditions are different here. In New Zealand on December the Twenty-fifth we are living (or are supposed to be living) under summer skies. A New Zealand Yuletide means one common impulse towards the sunlight and open air, toward the hills, the streams, the lakes, the sea shore. There it is that we seek for ourselves and wish for others a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

And yet we confess to an irrational envy of the real old-fashioned Christmas weather our cousins in the northern hemisphere are enjoying—the British Isles locked in ice, Europe north and south with the thermometer _ below freezing point, Vesuvius showing to Naples its nightly glare under a mantle of snow. Thanks to an excess of sunspots we are told; or, as some say, thanks to the unnatural introduction of wireless, or even thanks to the comet! Anyhow a true Shakespearian Christmas—

When Icicles hang by the wall And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs Into the hall And milk comes frozen home In pall; When blood Is nipped and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl. Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note. . , , * While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all around the wind doth blow And coughing drowns the parson’s saw. And birds sit brooding in the snow And Marion’s nose looks red and raw; When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl. Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note, .... , While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. No kitchen mysteries, no Christmas cheer; that is understood. So greasy Joan doth skim the pot and save a boilover. Later by centuries we have Thackeray and the literary staff of Punch mitigating the severities of Yuletide round the Mahogany Tree; Christmas is hare; Winds whistle shrill, Icy and chill. Little care we: Little we fear Weather without. Sheltered about The Mahogany Tree.

Care, like a dun. Lurks at the gate: * Let the dog wait; Happy we’ll be ! Drink every one; Pile up the coals, Fill the red bowls. Round the old tree! . . . • The Mahogany Tree. No place there for a Pussyfoot.

More than half a million of money has been lost—flung into the sea, as you may say—by the strike of wharf labourers in the Australian ports, a strike that didn’t last long, and is now over and done, leaving everybody the worse. The wickedness of it! —and the absurdity! By simply putting their hands in their pockets the Melbourne wharf labourers, who number 500, i£an arrest the whole out-going and in-coming trade of the Commonwealth with _a population of six millions. The six millions could flood the wharves with free labour, nothing easier. Yet nothing less possible.

Hughes, one of the most courageous of all our statesmen- \\ho himself found it necessary to break with organised labour —in his speech on the present strike, in the Federal Parliament, said that “ if free workmen were allowed to come on the wharves, that would bring about the most dreadful results.” An editorial comment is that the labourers “ have more authority over the ships than those . who own them and more rights over the wharves than the nation that built them ” —in fact that the 500 labourers own both; that “by the little word ‘black,’ a word more deadly than all the guns employed in the last war ” they can reduce ships and wharves alike to no value at all; and that, to sum up, “ the unreasonableness of the whole situation is beyond speech. One waits to sec whether the six millions are at the end of their resources.

From Central Otago. An affair of State: —

Dear " Civis,” —A friend of mine maintains that in case of the death of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales unmarried or leaving no heirs, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York would succeed to the Throne. To this I demur; —all King Georges male heirs would, I believe, be preferred to any of the female. I have not a copy of the Act of Succession, hut I am fairly confident that by it the Throne is settled upon the heir male of the reigning Sovereign according to the old ICorman law of primogeniture, and that the female line only succeeds after failure to produce a direct male heir. To- me, as an Englishman, the prospect of another Elizabeth on the Throne is interesting, setting me thinking of that high-spirited courageous lady, who, supported by her people, faced undaunted the mighty combination of Spain, France, and Rome, reviewed her Fleet at Tilbury, and sent her gallant men gaily to the fray. But the possibility of the Princess Elizabeth succeeding to the Throne appears to be remote.

Unlike the writer of this letter I am not a lawyer, but I can quote a case in point. On the death of William IV without issue the Crown passed to the Princess Victoria, daughter of his deceased brother, the Duke of Kent, though there were three younger brothers living. Speculating on the death of the Sovereign or his heir has in the past been counted high treason; so we will not discuss the future of the Prince of Wales, its possibilities and eventualities; except that, as loyal subjects, we may suggest that he should take to himself a wTfo and have children of his own. The sooner the better.

Something for the Burns Club: “The Scots are incapable of considering their literary geniuses purely as writers and artists. They must either be an excuse for the glass or a text for a sermon.” This from “ Caledonia, or the Future of the Scots, by G. M. Thomson,” a book reviewed in * the London press. The genius of Burns “an excuse for the Slass,” —no, not in Dunedin. At the Burn’s Club “ Auld Lang Syne ” is understood in a Pussyfoot sense. The pint R j mi p_“ And surely you'll be your pint stoup. and surely I’ll be mine”—may contain water; the “cup o’ kindness” is a cup of tea. Sentiment is expressed bv the joining of hands, the waving and the wobbling, not by the words. But I commend to the attention of the Club some remarks of the reviewer on the Burns vocabulary: There is not, it may be safely watered, one Scot out of every ten you may casually meet who could construe correctly Burns’s “Auld. Farmer's Address to his Mare.” There arc very few Scots to-day who do not believe fas they sing “ Auld Laos Syne”) that willie-waught is really a genuine Scots word: even Mr Evre-Todd in his " Scotch Poetry of the Eighteenth Century ” prints this monstrosity, as if wiilie was a part pf the wurd waught, oi draught.

“Waught” is Scottish for a big drink; " willie ” is an intensive —“ willie waught ” a big, big drink; but whenos Burns got the word nobody seems to know, and the reviewer offers no conjecture. He would be safe in his wager that not one living Scot in ten could construe correctly the “ Auld Fanner’s Address to his Mare.” Is this piece ever read at the Burns Club? Take a sample verse:— When thou an’ X were young an’ skeigh. An' stable-meals at fairs were drlegh, How thou wad prance, an’ snore, an’ skrelgh, An' tak the road ! Town's-bodles ran, an' stood abiegh, An’ ca’t thee mad. To-day the Ayrshire farmer would need a glossary for the words “ skeigh,” “ dreigh,” “ skreigh,” and “ abiegh.” It is said that Inverness talks English of the best; and Inverness is far north of Ayrshire. In due time the Lowlands, Burns’s Ayrshire included, may learn to talk like Inverness. At Canton, two thousand Beds in one red burial blent are something more than a comment on De Quincey’s casual remark that in China man is a weed. They are a Christmas greeting from Canton to the Soviet in acknowledgment of a Soviet orgy of blood and fire, illustrating the graceful lines of the Soviet official poet Bodny:— Strike them all dead, the malefactors. All those who have stolen our bread ! Ye workers, now smash to pulp With your fists that phantom, God! and of his understudy Maiakovski— Let the axte dance over their bald pates! Slay! Slay ! Bravo: and skulls are good for ash trays. By strange mischance having got possession of the city, these emissaries of the Soviet flung open the prisons, looted the banks, fired the Government offices, and issued a proclamation to the rest of China ordering the extermination of landlords, the destruction of title deeds and the confiscation of lands and houses. But tne Cantonese rallied, cam e again into possession of their own, and two thousand Reds were marched in procession through the streets to the place of their common doom. Here as usual the cables thrust upon us a discouraging batch of Chinese names —General Li Chai-sum, General Chang Fat-kwai, General Li Fuklum, General Hseih-yo. Who is who and which is which? A Chinese doctor of divinity has been figuring in the English magazines. Dr Timothy Tingfang Lew. As a distinguishing mark the “ Timothy " is very helpful.

We are told that each syllable in a Chinese proper name is significant, as in English proper names of the Puritan time, Tribulation Wholesome) for instance, and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. But Chinese syllables are not significant to us. Humorous examples of name-giving go far back. A Byzantine Emperor, Constantine V, carried through life the nickname “ Copronymus ” in allusion to an infantile misadventure at the baptismal font, an incident I should not care to describe in English. There are later stories. “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked the officiating minister before beginning the rite. “ A girl,” answered the father dicamily. “A boy! ” snapped in the mother. The parson took her word for it. She was the better informed. Again : “ Name this child.” “ Lucifer,” came the answer. “Lucifer!” exclaimed the scandalised officiant; “ I cannot give that name to any Christian child.” “ I said Lucy, sir,” came the correction, and all was well. The liking for Bible names is less common than it was. lam not sure about Maher-shalal-hash-baz, but there is an existing baptismal register of a child named Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin (Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting). Presumably the baby was “ only a little one.” J Cxvis.