PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23691, 24 December 1938, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

To the German policy of economic self-sufficiency the limit no doubt is the sky. Small wonder is it, therefore, that it should expand from internal affairs to eternal. Germany's Christmas is to be Germanised and paganised, thus undergoing a double purge. Writes the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Herald: " Organisations have been ordered to de-Christianise the ceremony, celebrating it as a great feast as in the days of the old pagan German tribes. There will be no carols or hymns, and shops are not displaying Christmas emblems." Gone will be many familiar figures of German song, folk-lore, and story, and nothing will be left of the old-fashioned German Christmas to justify the name. "Good King Wenceslas" will vanish in this new pogrom. For he was both Christian and Czech. An enlightened monaich was this tenth century King of Bohemia.

During his short reign of eight years Wenceslas showed himself to be a ruler far in advance of his times. He removed gibbets and gallows from the public places, regarding their presence as more likely to brutalise the neople than to deter them from crime. He also prohibited torture as a means of extracting confessions. He has been accused of being too submissive to the German King, but it must be remembered that he stood between two fires (or rather two fears), as Bohemia has always done.

Uncertain, however, will be the fate of other Christmas elements where the claims of Germanisation and paganisation will struggle for precedence. The mistletoe and holly are druidic and pagan, but they are Celtic and foreign. And the old German Christmas tree, with its pendent toys and mannikins, was part of the Roman Saturnalia, and was introduced into Germany by the conquering legions of Drusus. Virgil describes them in his Georgics: " Oscilla ex alta suspenduht mollia pinu"—"they suspend soft little masks of Bacchus from the tall pine tree." The epitaph placed by history on the tomb of Nazism will be: " They over-did it."

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. Stupendous and unceasing must be her task in filling up the vacant places, the yawning abysses, left by our vanishing Christmas customs. More than once it has been remarked that the rhyme between "holly" and "jolly" is more than merely convenient—that holly because of its rhyming became the natural Christmas symbol of jollity Thus Wither's Christmas carol: So now is come our joyfull'st feast; Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is drest, And every post with holly. Stow, in hit "Survey of London," published 400 years ago, says that in his time every-man's house, as well as streets and market crosses, was decorated with "holme." Thus did our fathers perpetuate the Druid custom of bringing evergreens to towns and houses in winter, in order that the woodland spirits might take shelter therein and preserve themselves from cold. In our own Dunedin Middle Ages of the eighties and nineties, George street shops similarly wreathed their verandah posts in greenery. Nowadays at Christmas time those same posts, where they exist, are as bare as a Scotsman's knee. In the Devonshire apple orchards of olden time the farmer and his men went into the orchard bearing a large pitcher of cider, and there circling one of the best trees, they drank a toast three times: Hall to thee good apple tree, Well to bear, pocket-fulls, hat-fulls, Peck-fulls, bushel fulls.

And then they threw the remainder of the cups of cider and the fragments of apples at the tree. What Cromwell or Roxburgh orchardist now encourages his trees in this way? He gives it water, not cider. How has Nature replaced the Old English " hoodman-blind " —when the Christmas players were blinded by the hoods they wore? Maybe by the Wingatui tote.

Can women spell? With this rhetorical question is headed a paragraph in Tuesday's paper. Now, a " rhetorical question " is defined as a question that requires no answer, or a question to which the desired answer is a natural negative. "Are we slaves? " asks the tub-thumper rhetorically. " No! " thunders the crowd. By this rhetorical heading the spelling powers of women are seriously called in question. The paragraph says: " Six employers, all men, beat their women secretaries by 15 points to 10 in a recent 8.8. C. over-the-air spelling bee." Since the words over which the spelling bee was set to buzz included such monstrosities as "sychnocarpous," "pettitoes," " hypsometer," " holily," "schism," the woman who fails in such an examination is none the worse for that, and can still remain a lady. Before the Education Act of 1870, men themselves could not spell—in fact, to spell badly was then to " spell like a gentleman." And in mediaeval times few men could rightly spell their own names. Dugdale the antiquary is said to have found more than 130 variants of the name Mainwaring amid the archives of that family. And in an old parish document is found the entry: On April 23, 1470, Elizabeth, Blynkkynesoppye, of Blynkkynsoppe, widow of Thomas Blynkyensope, of Blynkkensope, received a general pardon.

Her descendants to this day misspell their surname Blenkinsop. Hence the chaos in such family names as Lea, Leigh, Legh, Legge, Lay, Lye—all referring to " lea," a meadow. In the eighteenth century great ladies usually spelt atrociously Even Lady Hamilton, Romney's " Divine Lady" and Nelson's enchantress, could not spell. Though mistress of several foreign languages, she was never on good terms with her own. In her voluminous letters occur such sentences as: " Believe me, I am almost distracktid," " There is nothing like bying expearance," " Booth him and me are studying botany," " The chapel was covered with saints and other religious preservitaves," " He says I am a dymond of the first watter, and the finest creature on the hearth." Yet to Romney she was " the fairest woman God ever named," and he painted her 100 times. And her charm and beauty swept Nelson off his feet, used though he was to a heaving quarterdeck.

Straight to the point was the definition of a motor collision given at a meeting of the National Safety Congress in London. "A collision," said Colonel O'Gorman, " is when two people try to occupy the same bit of the road at the same time." The earliest road collision known to history is, by this definition, firmly established, ffisop relates it when he describes two goats meeting on a narrow one-goat bridge over a rushing stream. Each goat insisted on occupying the spot on the bridge on which the other stood. The result was a double casualty. The modern goat is a greater goat than both these ancient goats put together. For the modern goat is on a two-

goat road. To make the motor road goat-proof, the authorities have stationed a silent traffic director on every highroad. The broad white line is his white sleeve outstretched from east to west or from north to south. But goats will always meet. And when they meet they argue and " but" like goats. " But I —."

"Yes, but you —." Of these "butters" Fletcher says in his old play, " The Custom of the Country " (note the title!):

Thou comedy to men Whose services folly is a butt for all To shoot their wits at.

Brought up again in the correspondence columns of a London weekly is the old literary curiosity of "the five thats." Steele, in No. 86 of the Spectator, wrote: "My lords, with humble submission that that I say is this, that that that that that gentleman used is not that that he should have proved to your lordships." And the correspondent quotes the anonymous doggerel:

Five " thats " may closely follow one another, For be it known that we may safely write Or say, that that that that that man writ was right; Nay e'en that that that that that that has followed Through six repeats, the grammar's rule has hallowed, And that that that (that that that that began), Repeated seven times is right. Deny t who can. Similar to this is another puzzleto be solved by punctuation: " That that is is that that is not is not is not that is it is." A further example of seven "thats.": " That" may be, said Schoolmaster Brown, A conjunction or else a pronoun. But I'll declare flat In regard to that " that, That that " that" that that man used s a noun.

The schoolboy howlers quoted at the break-up of the Wellington Technical College last week might well be made the subject of study:—

A boy, asked his opinion of Nero, replied that the less said about Nero the better. , A boy defined a cone as a unit oi ice-cream measurement. A conservative is a house for green things full of hot air. Elijah was a prophet who went for a cruize with a widow.

An English headmaster recently said on the origin of howlers:

The present system of cramming too many subjects into a pupil is responsible to a large extent for the perpetration of howlers. It is the child who is just beginning to get ideas that gets them confused. Dull children rarely make howlers

It follows, therefore, that the best howlers may be really the poorest, and the worst the best. For a howler may be of one of three kinds: The genuine, the faked and the doubtful. And the genuine are frequently touched up by facetious masters. A pleasant exercise in wit and sensibility may therefore, be had by a psychological examination of howlers and the study of their sources. The following may be taken as genuine:—

Henry VIII would not allow Peter Spence to go to Rome. Jacob went in search of the golden fleece. A widow is a wife without a man. Cheese is butter gone bad. A hostage is a lady who entertains visitors. Dust is mud with the juice squeezed out. Wolsey's fate is attributed to his having shot at the Pope (i.e., aimed at the Papacy) Caesar swam the Rubicon because his boats were all burnt. When England was placed under an interdict the Pope stopped all births, deaths and marriages for a year. Herrings go to sea in shawls. Henry VIII married Amberlin.

But the following howlers sparkle overmuch, and are suspect:— ' The first book in the Bible is Guinessis. When Sir Walter Raleigh laid down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon, her Majesty remarked to him, " I'm afraid I have spoiled your cloak." To which the gallant knight replied, "Dieu et mon droit," which means " My God and your right." Martin did not die a natural death, he was excommunicated by a bull. The Chiltern Hundreds are the things you see with a microscope in cheese. Henry said, "Beware of the Brides of March." The Great Flood was sent because of the large numbers of dirty people. St. Paul looked at the man so fiercely that he began to walk. The seventh plague of Egypt was thunder and ale. One of St. Gregory's puns: A locust settled on his hand, and he said, "Lo, cust!" Henry the First never smiled when he heard that his son William was drowned. A monkey has a reprehensible tail Give one word for " love of mankind." Woman. Aladdin was a man who had a ring, and every time he rang a Guiness sprang up out of the ground. Sir Galahad is a poem for ladies. The past tense of " I want ,? is " I , got." Civis.