PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24911, 9 May 1942, Page 3

PASSING NOTES

Harold Nicolson, in a January issue of the Spectator, takes as his subject for the week one of the 8.8.C.’s most exasperating problems. Hc quotes a line from Horace to the effect that people are more excited by what they see than by what they hear. This, in his younger days, he used to believe. But his experience as an official of the 8.8. C. has shown him the falsity of Horace’s opinion. “ People can read a thing,” he says, “ without so much as a twitch of the eyebrow. Yet when they hear the same thing over the wireless they foam and shout with rage.” And one of the results 01 this strange malady, according to Mr Nicolson, is “ the symptom of nervous derangement provoked in quite sane people by the correct or incorrect pronunciation of foreign names.” Most ominously and disquietingly he attributes this irritation not so much to vanity, as “to the almost intolerable sense of frustration which now weighs upon the middle-aged.” From this new modern intolerance, once confined to theological questions, Mr Nicolson claims to be quite free. For he can hear without the quiver of a nerve the name of Teheran—his birthplace—pronounced “ Teheeran.” This more tolerant acceptance of the natural limits of human knowledge came to him when he was ignominiously condemned by an enraged sugar planter for the heinohs crime of pronouncing the second part of the name “Khota Baru ” as “ Bahru,” instead of “ Baroo.”

No such qualms of taste or conscience are suffered in these matters by the Frenchman, and to a large extent by the Italian. For both of them Gallicize and Italianize foreign names with the utmost freedom. In fact, it is their way so to do, such being their insularity and logicality. Mr Nicolson gives some examples which, if perpetrated by the 8.8. C., would make a “ middle-aged neurasthenic’’ tear out all the hair he has left. The Rome-Milan wireless might speak of Mr “ Kirkil ” as the greatest personality of the British nation. A French student in London might ask at Charing Cross Station for a ticket to "Cheese le Trst.” An Italian visitor to London might -ask a taxi-driver to take him to “No. 42. Kay Appsiddey.” He adds:

I was once asked by a French lady* journalist whether I had been deeply Influenced by the works of Mr " Benachot.” I 'replied that I was completely Ignorant of that writer. It was only by her astonishment that I gathered that I had been misled by her phonetic rendering of the illustrious English name.

Similarly with common nouns:

A foreign student of English remarked to a friend that In the newspaper that morning he had come across a word which seemed so strange to him that he could not understand It. The word was pronounced “ Low-offoly.”

Mr Nicolson appends no translations of these. An Englishman would, however, understand them at a glance, for they are all familiar household words and names.

Discontent with British Cabinet Ministers seems to grow with every by-election and with every Ministerial indiscretion. And once a Minister is guilty of an oratorial indiscretion some time elapses before he can make up the ground he has lost. Ministers of the Crown, especially in a crisis, should be strong silent men. Not tor them is it to rush in where angels fear to tread. Nor is it for them to utter from the public platform any purely private opinions whatsoever. Lord Beaverbrook spoke too much and too often. In January last he was appointed the opposite number to Mr Nelson, of America, Immediately it was suggested that he was not the man to apply the “Nelson touch.” and that, contrary to the Euclidian axiom, “things that were equal to the same thing would not in his case be equal to one another.” And now Mr Herbert Morrison. On May 5 last in a speech at Blackpool, he spoke out on that most controversial and explosive subject of the treatment of post-war Germany. “ I want justice for the German people. I oppose that foolish purposeless vindictiveness which was imposed on the German people after the last war.” Would that International problems were as simple at that!

Difficult as it doubtless may be to assess the full weight of letters sent from France to the 8.8. C. and to the Free French authorities in London, their numbers and their sentiments leave no doubt about their significance. A batch of July letters, selected from many, is quoted in the Revue de la Federation Britahnique. Usual in these letters is the exhortation to the British Government “Bomb our cities, if necessary.” From these letters three are selected:— “ If we except a few quarters where party spirit takes precedence of national feeling, the great majority of our people have understood that there is rfow no question of a war or Ideology. . . . Everyone realises that Russia is defending the cause of all the impressed peoples of Europe.” “ Evidently there are still some distorted minds who believe in the prestige of Marshal Retain, but' they are becoming fewer and fewer. If our General de Gaulle could disembark at • P , everyone, men women, young men, would follow him. It would be a magnificent hour.” “ There are a few precise facts which clearly show the spirit of the French people. At M— every arrival or departure of German or Italian ships ' provokes agitations among the dockers, who do.not shrink from hissing and whistling. Frequently the greater part of the cargoes destined for the Bosche is thrown into the sea.

Throughout the villages, casks of wine are made to leak like sieves.” The anti-British minority seems small, and likely to be negligible in a crisis.

How a careless guard over the subconscious mind may let the cat out of the bag was twice illustrated last week. A speaker in the German Official Wireless, desiring to minimise the damage done to German military objectives by the R.A.F. raids, pointedly omitted Augsburg from the list, as if it had completely escaped. But mention of Augsburg inadvertently slipped out afterwards when he spoke of Augsburg instead of Salzburg as the scene of the meeting between the Fuhrer and the Duce. Augsburg was bulking largely in his subconscious mind, lingering on the threshold and clamouring for utterance. And it came out in the wrong place. A second example occurred last week, of more local significance. At a meeting of an Auckland local body a letter was received from the Public Works Department, Wellington, addressed to “The Auckland Electric Power Board, Invercargill.” No conscious mistake was this. For every self-conscious Wellingtonian knows quite well where Auckland is. Rather was the error made by a self-conscious Southland clerk in the Public Works Office,,home sick for Gladstone or Otatara and the night-life of Dee street. He had just written his weekly letter home.

There have been other cures for warts besides one mentioned last week, according to which a man’s warts disappeared when a lady offered a penny each for them. Of course, the story of this cure has not been fully told. The whole history of warts is the history of early medical science. One old cause of warts was the spit of a frog—which did not explain why warts spread and multiplied when the frog had done his work. Of popular cures for warts the number is legion. A wart could be cured by rubbing it over with a black snail which had to be afterwards impaled on a hawthorn. Or by cutting a lock of hair from the nape of a person’s neck without his knowledge. Or by rubbing the wart with a cinder—this to be tied up in paper and dropped where four roads meet, whereupon it would transfer itself to the person who found the packet. But these are popular cures. More surprising is a cure mentioned by the great Bacon, father of modern inductive science. He had had a wart from childhood, and at the age of 16 it had increased to over a hundred. When he was in Paris on one occasion the wife of the English Ambassador, a lady far from superstitious, offered to remove them. She got a niece of lard with the skirvon. rubbed the warts all over with the fat side, and then nailed the piece of lard, towards the sun, upon the post of her chamber window. In five weeks the warts had all vanished, including the one which Bacon had had so long for company. Civis.