PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3415, 29 August 1919, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

CFrom Saturday's Daily Tisaca.) " The world is suffering from shell shock on a large scale," Mr Lloyd George says. I may have said the same thing myself; anybody might have said it. But by whomsoever said or wheresoever (Mr Lloyd George has the advantage of saying it from a high place) the word is a true word, the word of the situation. People who are unreasonably making trouble—the Labour people generally, let us say for short—are not quite sane. Nor are the people for whom they make trouble. " Everybody's nerves were jaded and torn after the strain of war," continued Mr Lloyd George. "Everybody was complaining of everybody else, while some complained of Providence; but these tendencies were world-wide, and would pass." Let us believe it; for my own part I believe it profoundly. We have served a four years' apprenticeship to death and destruction. Respect for human life and for the products of human industry we learned to set aside.* He was most the patriot and most the soldier who most effectively could kill and destroy. We were all in it; —the mind of the whole British people was schooled to a regulated and scientific savagery. We cannot unlearn all that in a day. Add the moral " shell shock " of the things we have known —and seen —and done. It is not strange that all of us should still be far from the normal, and that some of us —the Yorkshire mine v s, for instance, who not only struck work but destroyed the mines they worked in—are positively dotty. Temporary aberration is a verdict of wide relevance just now. Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just, Ani four timeo he who gets his blow rn fu=)t. —American Shakespeare. Wherein, as Sir Joseph Ward sees it, are summed up both tactics and strategy. Sounding out in windy explosion through ail newspapers —not precisely A blast of that dread horn On Fontarabian echoes borne, nothing so poetical; nevertheless a blast that Mr Massey (who remarks plaintively that he ought'to have had notice) must crack his cheeks to rival—Sir Joseph geta his " blow" in fust. A blow it is, and a blowing. Nothing that man or woman, reasonable or unreasonable, can desire is left unpromised. Or if left unpromlsed

it is not left unsuggested. A State bank, State collieries, State ferries across Cook Strait, State flour mills, State motor lorries where there are no railways, State bounties and gratuities right and left; — free school books for children, together with free dentistry, free medical attendance, free railway transit j a free pathway to Parliament for women, together with equal pay for equal work—all this and more;—time toils after him in vain. The celebrated "Bill for Giving Everything to Everybody" in Sam Warren's " Ten Thousand a Year" may hav© gone one better; but there is no chance that Mr Massey can. Nothing is left for Massey to give 5 Ward has. given away everything already. And so we shall be. c shut up to the simple and intelligible iss&: Codlin's your friend, not Short.

A queue is a tail, —in France, that is. A French dog's tail is his "queue." And when in revolution time the Paris housewives form up, rank behind rank, outside a baker's shop,' and end by hanging the baker over his own doorstep, the name they give their formation is " queue," the vernacular equivalent of "tail." But in England, when a tail forms itself at the pit door of a theatre, or outside a food shop—as happened daily in the war time—that tail is not a tail, but a " queue." We avoid the vernacular, —for decency's sake, perhaps; anyhow, so it is. We are establishing the queue in Dunedin, name and thing. Aa early as 7 a.nv. in the cold and rain, a queue of intending patrons (of the Students' Carnival Concert) began to form up, and by the time the office opened at 9 o'clock the waiting crowd extended up Princes street and round into Moray place as far as Disk's jewellery establishment. The eagerness of some of the waiters led to considerable confusion and disorder in the office, and the doors had to be closed for a time. Same thing at the sale of tickets for the "' Elijah " concert, I hear. In this office, comment by the p.d. on duty runs into rhyme: ' Seven a.m., a wintry sky, and —something new_: Outside a ticket-seller's door —10, a . queue. The rain it rained, the sleet it slseted, the wind it blew; Hours had the shivering line completed;—still it grew, Down the street persisting, round the corner twisting,—out of view. Giddy goats these early comers, —a witless crew, Who all for love of mimes and mummers —risk the flu' ~« In a queue. The p.d. may not have been in the queue, but it is pretty certain that, if he could, he would have smuggled himself into the carnival concert, and all for love of mimes and mummers. So wide may be the discrepancy 'twixt doctrine and practice: We take our pleasures seriously—not to say sadly, as Froissart says—and we take too much. How many theatres do we run in Dunedin? Whoever will may make the count. At the Christchurch Grand National, three days, the totalisator average was £50,000 a day. At Masterton, the Stipendiary Magistrate in a police court case remarked it as " peculiar " that a woman in receipt of charitable aid should own a motor car. Peculiar, but not past parallel—spite of our howling over profiteers and the cost of living. Compulsory Rugby for the High School needs courage in its advocates. There is little attraction in compulsory anything. " Go as you please " carries further nowadays. Of course in the Falstaff lubberland—or fairyland, if you prefer it—compulsion was banned. What, up compulsion? Zounds, an I were at the strappado, or all the racks in the world, I would not tell you on compulsion. 1 Give you a reason on compulsion ! if reasons were as plentiful as blackberries I would give no man reason upon Compulsion, I. The Dunedin High School is no lubberland, but within its precincts the chances of Rugby football would be ruined by com-

pulsion. So it seems, anyhow. At Eugby School compulsion ruled—as we may read in "Tom Brown's School Days;" no boy could escape the Rugby game. Other times other manners. I am all for the more strenuous football myself, but hardly on compulsion. AVhat surprises is the heat this proposal has generated in the friends of Soccer. One of them expands and expatiates through more than a column of the Daily Times. As we all know, school games and the customs thereof are a sacred thing, almost sacramental. There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night— Ten to make and the match to win— A bumping pitch end a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. ... The tone is grave—more than grave, all but tragic. This, however, is cricket. One doesn't expect the same intense solemnity about Soccer. .- Nirvana—for and against, what, where, how?—cannot be argued in this column. But if by reference, or allusion (which is not quite the same thing as reference), I have put the Buddhist goal in an untrue light, I submit myself to correction, and thereby, doubtless, shall acquire merit. Dear " Oivis," —Have you not made B, trifling error in interpreting- "the Shining Sea" as " nothingness' ? Is it not rather "allncss''' —the pleroma of the Greek philosophers, which was certainly a plenum, not a void? And have you not forgotten that other passage in the wonderful Sermon in the Deerpark—the first delivered by. Siddartha Guatama after enlightenment: " Seeking nothing, he gains all; Foregoing self, the Universo grows " I " J If any say NIRVANA is the cease, Say unto such they lie. . If any teach NIRVANA is to live, Say unto such they err; not knowing this, Nor what light shines beyond their broken lamps, Nor lifeless, timeless bliss. Surely the n?.ture of God cannot possibly bo '' life " as we conceive it! Yet ' it as surely cannot be "nothingness"; it must be super-life. You may recall Tennyson's handling 1 of the same matter in " In Memoriam. ' He speaka, first of a " faith as vague as all unsweet," but rises to a truer appreciation of the doctrine, and closes the section with the noble words "lose ourselves " —not in darkness, note, -but "light."—Yours very truly, Student. I do not argue (and this, by the way, must be the last of the subject), but may be allowed to enlarge the Tennyson quotation : That each, who eeemsi a separate whole, Should! move his rounds, and fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as oil unsweet:! Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet. It is the word of Buddha, we are told, that The dewdrop slips"into the shining sea. When two dewdrops have thus arrived, is it to be understood that the one dewdrop will know the other "when they meet"? Dear "Oivis," —Reading Passing Notes on Saturday about a sailing master at Auckland that could neither read nor write, puts OJ© in mind of what I used to see when I was a boy, in the navy, old style. This is an old-style man-of-war's man, whose artless gossipping of the days that are no more would fill half a column. Pity that he should be cut short; but needs must. " When I was in the old Formidable, flag ship, at the Nore, flying the flag of Vice-admiral Sir Baldwin Walker, K.C.8., in 1867," he begins,— "I used to see"—etc., etc. One thing he used to see was the barge traffic up and down the Med way, —"topsail" barges and "stumpy ones," in each a crew of one or two hands, the master, and, not seldom, the master's wife. If, on occasion, the master had to go forrard, the wife would take the tiller, a broom having been placed on one side of the deck, a bucket on the other. Then the ' steering orders would be not " hard a port " and " hard a s'taTboard," but "hard a broom," and "hard a bucket." That saved mistakes. He continues: The only Mechanics in th© Navy up to this time were Carpenters, Blacksmiths, Coopers, and Armourers. Afterwards the Navy took on Ratings called Artificers. One day the Artificers had to be ashore at Sheemess Dockyard at 12 o'clock noon to do some work, and the Officer of the watch told the Boatswain's mate to pipa the "Artificers" to get their dinner at sevsn bells. ("Ar-tificers" —accent on the second syllable.) "Aye, aye, sir," said the boatswain's mate, though he had never heard of " ar-tificers before. An old salt, at sea all his life, he was of the sort for whom the Bellerephon was the " Billy Rough-un," and the Temeraire the " Timmy Rarey." Putting his, head down the hatchway he sung out, " D'ye hear there? —the Lord-stiffen yers, get yer dinner." "And that reminds me" —proceeds the old man-of-war's man, leisurely meandering—" of what happened in

another flag-ship, the Victoria, Admiral Lord Clarence Paget, when she came" home from the Mediterranean to pay off." What happened was that the crews of the " barge and a cutter were piped to dinne* at seven hells, forenoon watch, because the two boats were ordered for the shore at eight bells. But, consequent on a change of plan, the officer of the watch told the boatswain's mate to " postpone the barge," and " expedite the cutter." Well what do you think ha did, sir? (Everyone knows that Portsmouth is on one side of Portsmouth Harbour and Gosport the other.) He blew his whistle and put his head down the hatchway, and sang out: "Do yer bear there?— Portsmouth the barge, and Gosport the cutter." When "postpone" became " Ports* ' mouth," "expedite," its' opposite, inevif tably became " Gosport,"—the two towns lying opposite, each other. Superfine English from bridge or quarter-deck must „ have gone out with the old navy. " They didn't talk that way in Admiral Beatty's ships, still less in his mosquito fleet of, destroyers and patrols. From Hawera a correspondent sends me local press cuttings in which "Civis-" is arraigned and condemned for saying that we shape foreign place names to our liking-—" English is mistress in her own house." On the contrary,—writes an egregious simpleton signing himself " Linguist,"—we are to pronounce foreign place* names foreign fashion. We must not talk of Ghent as Ghent, English fashion — , , . The burgesses voted with common consent , Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent. . . . we are to say Gand, Belgian fashion. By, the same rule we should talk of Belgium as la Belgique; France should bo la France; Switzerland, la Suisse; Germany should be Deutschland, Prussia should be Preussen. Roma we should say, not Rome; Napoli, not Naples j Firenze, not Florence; Venezia, not Venice; Wien, not Vienna. All of which is sheer silliness. In a foreign country we talk foreign fashion; if we can; in our own country we talk in our own fashion, —English is mistress in her own house. The egregious simpleton would call Paris Par-ee, as if French were mistress. Times and oft have I quoted in this column the Horace ruletrue after 20 centuries, true to the end of time—that usage settles everything: TJsua, Quern, penes arbitrium est, et jus et norma, loquendi.' \ A people talks as it chooses to talk, and that is the language—usage is usage. Grammars, dictionaries, maps, gazetteers,, come after and record what they find. In! English usage Paris is Paris, and we rhyme it with Harris. If we chose to rhyme it" with Timbuctoo the Parisians would have, no redress. Civis.