PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23897, 26 August 1939, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Stunned by the unexpected, bewildered by the Inexplicable, London press comment on the war crisis has become surmise, and assertion has sunk to conjecture. For reports are received only to be contradicted the morning after, and what is said to-day may have to be unsaid tomorrow. Naive and futile, therefore, are dogmatic opinions half-a-world away. Amid memories of 1914 stand out the confident solutions, offered so airily on street corners and on tram platforms, of some Great War problems which have not yet been entirely solved after a generation of expert researches into Foreign Office records, into books blue, white and yellow, and into libraries of personal memoirs. .Propagandist orations by Fuhrer and Duce, and lofty appeals to justice and “national vital interests” are merely the preliminary tactics of war. That “Danzig is no concern of Great Britain,” whether said or not by Herr Hitler in a memorandum to Mr Chamberlain, is at present the standpoint of Germany. But Danzig is a symbol, the limit of democratic endurance, the climax of a career of violence, to be regarded not alone, but in the light of all that has gone before. When Robespierre, after “eliminating ” his colleague Danton, himself fell, and appealed for protection to his supporters in the upper benches, he was met with the cry, “No, the blood of Danton chokes you.” Whatever claims Germany has to Danzig, her voice is choked by the blood of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Spain. And her condemnation of Versailles is choked by the ruthlessness of her own Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Useful service is done to New Zealand speech by its annual examination up and down the country by the various Competitions Societies. “ External ” examinations have in this matter an uncontested value. And these are the only external examinations in speech held in a land where written examinations are as plentiful as blackberries and as sacred as were the crocodiles to the ancient Egyptians. To our Education Department the spoken language might almost be nonexistent. Only from Competitions judges do we get a general criticism of New Zealand speech, and but for them we would perpetually be admiring our own faces in the looking-glass. For familiarity breeds equanimity, and, in speech matters, encourages adulation. A press report says: According to Mr Rupert Harvey, adjudicator at the Dunedin Competitions Festival, “ sheer laziness” is the cause of one of the common. faults in the elocution section. This particular fault he describes as "swallowed conson- , ants,” the cause of which is the reluctance to drop the lower jaw. Other faults remarked upon in nearly every section are improperly formed vowel sounds and thickened sibilants, almost approaching a lisp. A deadly indictment this. And more deadly than it seems. For competitors at our Competitions Festivals are presumably the better class of speakers. If such be the faults of the cream of our young speakers, what are the faults of the skim milk? -

A judge at a recent competitions festival m Christchurch said: Fortunately New Zealand does •not suffer from the "terrible dialects” met with in England. But some of the singers fail to use the standard English vowel sounds, and the speech Is very impure. . . . The speech of the younger generation in New Zealand is much worse than that of their parents.

A change of heart is needed—a shifting of emphasis from writing to speaking. For the coming age will be one of speech. There are nationalits among us who salute the flag on all, our ceremonial occasions, but wish to cut the painter in matters of the spoken language. “ New Zealand has arrived at manhood,” they say, “ and is entitled to its New Zealand speech.” “ Separationists,” they wish to eat their cake and have it. They accept the written word religiously, demand its traditional spelling, piously speak of our heritage of language, and yet give to the spoken word any old sound they please. Of what is meant by “ Standard English,” and “ Received Standard ” and “ Modified Standard ” they have little knowledge. They confuse one and all of them with the Oxford and ether eccentricities, of which standard English takes no notice. They give it a purely social significance, and see red the while. Yet there is room in standard English for the neat and crisp enunciation, the clear articulation, the excellent vowel sounds heard any day from young London clerks at tea in a London tea-shop.

Among its other terrorist activities, the I.R.A. had plotted to complete the interrupted attempt of Guy Fawkes to reform the House of Lords. When Sir Samuel Hoare moved the second' reading of the Violence Prevention Bill in the House of Commons, he referred in tragic tones to the I.R.A, plot to blow up Parliament. Did the Commons tremble as one man? The humour of the situation was too much. Some solid and responsible members shouted “Hear, Hear! ” There was a loud burst of laughter, in which numberless M.P.’s shouted, “A good idea!” “We would get a new building." “There would be more room.”

As it happens, since the days of Guy Fawkes, the progress of civilisation has made much more easy the blowing up of Parliaments. A simple matter would it be to flick a Mills bomb from a gallery right down in front of Mr Speaker’s chair. No such facilities had Guy Fawkes. In no way could he conceal his 35 barrels of gunpowder about his person, or flick them down on the spot where they should go. Guy Fawkes had to burrow underground, transporta shipload of powder barrels in, and smuggle wagon loads of excavated soil out, under the very eyes of the passers-by. But in a present-day gunpowder plot there would still be a catch—the same catch that caught out Guy Fawkes. No one minds giving an M.P. here and there a real “ blowing up.” This is quite justifiable and frequently laudable. But to blow up the whole boiling of them, to land friend and foe in one red burial blent, is surely overdoing it. T n every House there may be a few whom you would like to spare. And to spare these you would trip up precisely as Guy Fawkes tripped. You would circularise a few friends warning them that “ the House will rise to-night at 9.3 o—stay at home.” Or,* “There will be a blow-up in the debate tonight—don’t come.” Each friend would show his note to his benchmate. “ Somebody’s taking a rise out of me.” “Yes, he thinks you a subject of risibility.” The secret would soon get out. For how could an M.P. stay at home without his wife inquiring about it?

“This is not a mere nine-days’ wonder,” said a Wellington waterside worker a week ago, referring to the now famous beer strike of 1939,

and emphasising the miracle of it. “We are solid; in fact, the boys are more solid in this matter than ever I expected.” Already his prophecy is coming true. Mistaken were those who imagined that in a week everything would be over bar “ shouting,” that abstinence would make the heart grow fonder, and that hands would soon again be crossing the bar. The tumult and the “shouting” have not died, and still remains the ancient sacrifice of selfimposed prohibition. In their own words, the watersiders “ are standing firm, and are not going to take it lying down.” The movement “ handled ” at the Wellington waterside has already frothed and spilt over other bars. The Auckland watersiders on Monday decided to declare all hotels “black” till they are satisfied “ that the increased beer tax is being equally borne by all sections of the community.” Illogical and even outrageous is this contention. The man who has no liking for beer, or who, for other reasons, manfully and heroically resists his aching longing for it, must pay for his heroism twice over. Because at the Bull and Bush they allow no shouting on the house, you and I who drink no beer must shout for those who do. Great is The rapturous, wild, ineffable pleasure Of drinking at somebody else’s expense.

From Queenstown: Dear Civis, —I am sending you an extract from the Magazine Digest, April, 1939, as I think it may shed some light on your recent query regarding “ the* Empire on which the sun never sets." “John Bull,” so Lincoln says, “met with a North American Indian, and in the course of conversation was very anxious to impress him with the greatness of the British Empire. ‘The sun,’ said Mr Bull, ‘never sets on English dominions. Do you understand how that is?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Indian, ‘that is because God is afraid to trust the English in the dark,”’ In other versions of this story the words are placed in the mouth of an Irish heckler at an English patriotic meeting. And somehow they sound more piquant when flavoured with a pinch or two of attractive Irish brogue.. Appropriate to this story is the origin of the name “John Bull” itself. It dates from Dr Arbuthnot’s satire, “The History of John Bull” (1712), written as a political allegory to ridicule the Duke of Marlborough, and to render unpopular the Continental war then raging. Each European nation was given a nickname by Arbuthnot: “ Louis Baboon ” for the Frenchman, “ Nicholas Frog ” for the Dutchman, and so on. “ John Bull ” for the Englishman was the only one of them tha,t stuck.

Why the English have adhered to the traditional figure of John Bull as their national representation—a bluff, kindhearted, bull-necked and bull-headed , farmer—has puzzled more than one. Wrote Washington Irving on the matter: One would think, in personify-

ing itself, a nation would picture something grand, heroic, imposing. But it is characteristic of the peculiar humour of the English, and of their love for what is blunt, comic and familiar, that they have embodied their national oddities in the figure of a sturdy, corpulent old fellow, with red waistcoat, leather breeches, and a stout

cudgel. Almost too good to be true is the thought that the British National Anthem “ God Save the King ” was composed—both words and music—by Dr John Bull (1563-1628), organist at the Antwerp Cathedral, where the original manuscript is still preserved. Others, alas, attribte both words and music to Henry Carey (1740), author of “Sally in Our Alley”; others again credit them to James Oswald, chamber composer to George 111, 1742. The air and opening words, says an authority, were probably suggested by the “ Domine Salvum ” of the Catholic Church. The words have doubtless often been altered. The lines “ Frustrate their knavish tricks,” etc., are said to contain a reference to the Gunpowder Blot. The words “ Send him victorious,” which have a Jacobite ring about them, are found cut in an old Jacobite glass tankard. Civis.