CURIOSITIES OF REPORTING.

Otago Witness, Issue 1957, 27 August 1891, Page 36

CURIOSITIES OF REPORTING.

By J. S. J., in the Argus. . . . The compositor is often sorely perplexed by the strange " fists " he has to decipher. One of the funniest stoiies told in this connection is that of a well-known local journalist, who in a leading article j wrote the sentence, " It merged into a harmonious whole," and was delighted to read in the proof, "It surged like a Norwegian whale." It was the same gentleman who, many years ago, when the first All-England Eleven visited Australia, wrote that through some mischance the team would lose the services of its slow bowler, and the^ paper next day announced that " the team will lose the services of its steam-boiler." The only story fit to be placed beside these is one of Horace Greeley's, whose awful handwriting is proverbial. He once wrote the line : 'Tli true, 'tis pity ; pity 'fcis, 'tla true ; and was struck dumb with astonishment when he read : 'Tis two, 'Mb fifty; fifty 'tis; 'fclfl five. Poetical quotations are often a pitfall to the unwary reporter. The orator who decorates his speech in that way does so at his peril, for he can never be sure as to how it will appear in print. To begin with, no speaker should attempt to throw in a sprig of poetry without giving due notice to the reporter of his intention to do so. It is always best to throw out some such hint as "to quote Tennyson's beautiful lines," or, "as Shakespeare has it," or "4ri the words of the poet Longfellow." Unless this be done, it is not always evident (to the I reporter at least) that the quotation is l poetry. The present Chief Justice is said i once to have quoted Milton in this off-hand way in an address at Ballarat, and to have been staggered the next day to see the whole of Milton's remarks, turned into the third person, and made part and parcel of Mr Higinbotbam's speech. Perhaps that was why on a subsequent occasion, when his Honor spoke atj an Imperial Federation meeting in Melbourne, he took care to hand to the reporters of each paper a "fair copy" of, the quotations he had used. Another local speaker in an after-dinner speech made use without acknowledgment of the line from Shelley :

The One remains, the many change and pats ; and the reporter serenely ran it on without the " quotes " to indicate that the remark was not original. On the other hand, it is possible for prose quotations to resemble verse sufficiently in sound to deceive the note-taker. At the Imperial Federation meeting already referred to, Lord Leamington, being on a visit to the colony, moved one of the resolutions, and he introduced into his speech the opening words of Marcus Clarke's preface to Gordon's poems :— " Australia is the land of the dawning ; wrapped in the early mists of rrorning her future looms vague and gigantic." All the reporters, without collusion, gave this as a triplet, one of them, to improve the verse, altering it in this way : — Australia is the land of the dawning, Wrapped in the mists of the morning Her future looms vague and gigantic. It should be added that one unfortunate scribe mis-read his note so as to make the last line —

Her future limbs vague and gigantic —

a slip which will explain itself to any writer of Pitman.

Our local politicians —except Mr Deakin and Mr Shieis— are not much given to poetical allusion, and it is just as well. They are not always happy when they attempt it. Only the other day, in a speech on Federation, a member of the Assembly provoked roars of laughter by his attempts to drag in two hackneyed lines o£ Shakespeare. They commended themselves to his final judgment in this form : — It'e better to bear the ills we've gob Than fly to others that we don't know anything about. At the banquet given to the Federation delegates in Sydney in March last, the Victorian Premier wound up his speech rather lamely with those very familiar lines of Longfellow :— Let us then be up and doing. With a heart for any fate ; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labour and to wait. And a Sydney journal the next day had this extraordinary juhable :— Let us thea be up and coing, -with a heart for anything ; Still achieving, still punuing, learn to labour and to

Mr Munro was treated worse still by a Badical paper in Victoria, for by some confusion the latter part of his speech was tacked on to the oration of Sir Henry Parkes, who, much to his own disgust, was made to round off his peroration with the sohoolboy lines just quoted,

i The use of foreign words and phrases is another prolific cause of disaster. Sometimes the indistinct utterance of the speaker ( is to blame ; sometimes deficiencies in the reporter's education are accountable for the mishap. It was a reporter of unimpeachable ability who not long ago, in a report of the Presbyterian General Assembly, made the Bey. Dr Nish say that a reverend brother had a "hang-shang " for something or other. The learned cleric no £ 'doubt meant penchant, but gave the word such a broad Doric rendering that the scribe was deceived into creating a new piece of Scotch slang. The same excuse cannot .be made for the New Zealand reporter who, when the late Mr Justice Johnston said that the whole quesI tion really resolved itself into Cvi bono, said the learned judge characterised the whole case as a piece of "ki-bosh." The only extenuating plea remaining to the reporter in this case would be that of Dr Johnson, when a lady asked him how he came to define " pastern " in his dictionary as " the knee of a horse." " Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance." In the hoary legend of the speaker who made use of the phrase, Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed major Veritas, it was probably through a defect of hearing that the reporter was led to produce it, " I may cuss Plato, I may cuss Socrates, said Major Veritas." Nor are errors of hearing confined to phrases from other languages. Some three years ago Sir Bryan O'Loghlen, speaking in the Legislative Assembly, referred to the judgment of the Supreme Court in the famous appeal case of Ah Toy v. Musgrove as being " very luminous," and it came to the reporter's ears and appeared in the paper as "voluminous." Their Honors would hardly regard that as a compliment. Curiously enough, precisely the converse of this mistake was made last century in the report of Sheridan's great speech at the impeachment of Warren Hastings. He was made to refer to " the correct periods of Tacitus or the luminous page of Gibbon ; " and the author .of the " Decline and Fall " mentions the circumstance with much gratification in his "Autobiography." Someone asked Sheridan how he came to compliment Gibbon with the epithet " luminous." "My dear fellow," was Sheridan's reply, " I said vo-luminous." .

Conscientiousness is an important virtue in a reporter, and when it is absent the public speaker is apt to suffer. Bishop Moorhouse once had a curious experience in this respect in a provincial city of Victoria. The bishop had preached in the city in the morning, and in the evening was to occupy the pulpit in an o allying township. The reporter of one of the local papers had to "look after" the bishop, and was equally anxious to spend the Sunday evening with his young lady. But he knew the archdeacon ; the archdeacon was to accompany the bishop ; and when the archdeacon came home he would be able to tell all about the sermon. Nothing could be pleasanter. The gay reporter basked in the srdiles of his lady-love till it was time for the archdeacon to be back, and then he made his way to the deaconry, to find — Oh, horror I — that the archdeacon hadn't gone after all, and, what was worse, that the bishop himself was not coming back that night. What w^s to be done ? The agitated scribe confided his trouble to the • archdeacon, who laughed, stroked his chin, and said he dida't knW what to suggest. At length, the young man's distress was so evident that the archdeacon said he knew the bishop's text, and had a good idea of the way in which the bishop was likely to treat it— and — yes, perhaps he could even venture to suggest the leading points of his lordship's discourse. The reporter was saved from j ruin — was even complimented next day upon the excellent half-column be had turned out, for reporters arelnot always strong on theology. And when the bishop met the archdeacon he described the incident as " extraordinary." It was a good report— a capital report. The writer of it must certainly have heard the sermon ; yet the phrases were quite new to the bishop, and, most astonishing of all, after following the sermon with tolerable fidelity up' to a certain point, the report suddenly branched off into a line of argument which he [had not even touched upon. I don't know whether the archdeacon disclosed the key to the puzzle, or whether the reporter continued to report sermons in the same agreeable way ; but his case was almost as desperate as that of the House of Commons reporter who, when O'Gonnell complained that he had been misreported, put in the defence that as he was going to the newspaper office the rain most unfortunately streamed into his pocket, and washed out his .notes of the. speech ; upon which the Irish orator declared it was the most extraordinary shower of rain he had ever heard of, for it had not only washed out the speech he did make, but it had washed in another speech which he did not make.