OUTCASTS OF LITERATURE. (Outlook.)

Otago Witness, Issue 2516, 4 June 1902, Page 65

OUTCASTS OF LITERATURE. (Outlook.)

If one could fish out of the well ni English undefiled all the exotic parts of .speech which centuries - have accumulated there, like tdie - crooked pins and pebbles in a wishing-well. what a heap of foreign matter would be piled on the edge! The exigencies and complexities of modem civilisation have brimmed ihe well with such innumerable accretions that one is in 'danger of forgetting the original limpid excellence of the water. Present-day English ia a polyglot- and nondescript tongue, th© sweepings and siftings of half the world. The old solid monosyllabic words which were wont to suffice for the usages of daily life are reckoned vulgar, obsolete, inadequate ; they must be replaced or companioned by a multiplicity of derivative terms, an illimitable throng of alien phrases, until our mother-tongue would seem to resemble "Hamlet" in the lady's descrip-, tion, "all made up of quotations." Could not some of these strangers and foreigners be re-exchanged for e'ertain real English words, now languishing in a most unmerited obscurity? Ido 'not refer, to Wardour street English, or to the very, terrible forms of Early-English, phraseology which one discovers in the works of William Morris, for example ; nor would I wish to exhume from old dictionaries the many specimens of felicitous "but obsolete words enshrined there. But, lingering in remote corners and out-of-the-way places, there are many desirable words which one might fetcTi back into common use. We stigmatise them as provincialisms, because in out stupidity we fail to recognise them as angels unawares. ... ' Some of them are " portmanteau-words," very nearly in the same sense as Lewis Carroll's immortal inventions. They carry the meaning of a whole sentence wrapped up in one Tvord. While you are laboriously going round about to refer to the-gleaning* of-the-last-apples-left-on-the-top-of - a - tree, the Wessex man says " Colepexy " and has done -with it. While you are clumsily, explaining that what you want is some spe-cial-impromptu-contrivance-to - meet - the-special-requirements-of-a-certain-thing, the seafaring man shall cheerfully ooserve that he has rigged you up a "timonoggy." When you fumble for words to describe graphically the blue, shrivelled, pinched, starveling appearance of a person benumbed with cold, your provincial friend succinctly remarks, " Her did look shrammed ! " There are scores and scores of these invaluable words. To " kern," for instance, is to turn from flower to fruit (cf. "kernel"); to " batter " is to scrape furiously with small effect. Can anything be more useful than " tarrow," to be over-dainty for want of appetite, or " covine," a deceitful contrivance between two people to injure a third? One continually hears a child "gowle," i.e., weep more in anger than in sorrow ; and as frequently it " chippers," or speaks in a rapid, excited manner ; also it is sometimes " tranty," or wise and forward beyond its years.

Most of these admirable time-saving ap« pliances in speech, unfortunately, are apt,not so much for the hurrying ways of town as for the slow and ponderous occupations of country life. It is of but small avail to the street-bred man to know that a ''linch" is the strip of copse along a hillside ; that a " luck " is a pool left by the receding tide ; that corn blown about when nearly ready for reaping is summed up in one word " scraald " ; or that, if he knew how to attend to a hedgerow by cutting off nearly all its branches and bending; down the remainder on the bank, and half covering them with sods, whereby they may throw oufcJ'Tiew shoots, it would be briefly termed " plashing." These memorials of a. lost state of rural innocence would but serve to remind the townsman of that coun-

try which, is the ultimate goal of his fancy ; ■that earth, with which he hungers to dabble field or garden, and to which—^ too often -—he only returns- as earth himself. More Appropriate, I fear, for the city man are «fuch -words as "bever," a drink between imeals j " strome," to stride and roam to 9nd fro "as one in perplexity; "lith," or jmovable property; end "forswink," to Krear oneself out -with bard toil. 1 But it is the essence of a good provincialism that a latest meaning shall exude jprom ifc, beyond the superficial significance nrhich strikes first on the mind. To take three similar terms, ihow much, more caressing is the thought of a "nestle-tripe" than jthe cold mention, oi the youngest bird in ifclie nest! To name a "doll-pig" at once conveys an actual mental image of the .•smallest pig in the litter ; and never was tenderer phrase than the north-country f burd-alone," the last chjld living of a family. Even in these days of weekly g>enny funeral insurance, there is room for ?fche significant "bell-penny," the money ,ftaid by to pay for the tolling of one's own aeath-knell ; and there is a right swishing sound in "whiddick,"- the long supple fbranch of underwood frequently applied to /fche unruly members of a family. Whiddick is the only word which rhymes with V scriddick," or jot, corresponding to the Mautieal " affigraffy " ; you might say, for instance : I larrap'd en wi' a whiddick, Her didn't csre a scriddick. ;

Many of these words are onomatopoetic, and are obviously constructed on the principle of sound first and all the rest no■where — that is, if they ever were constructed in the ordinary sense. Of most of /them one " 'spects they grew," like Topsy, and were crystallised into permanent popularity by virtue of their singular Tightness, on the rule of survival of the fittest. Of euch are " scoggel," to gulp voraciously without chewing ; " tang," to make a nois© twith trays and shovels when bees swarm ; •'scuff," to scrape the feet in a slipshod manner in walking (not to be confounded jwith shuffle) ; and certain mud-words, as /they may be called — "pautch," to walk gainfully in deep mud ; " plout," to wade and flounder through mud or water ? sleech," soft mud or sand at the bottom of water when taken away and used for manure. All who have had actual experi*nce of country mud will agree as to the jextraordinary verisimilitude of the above "lpun&s.