PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3861, 13 March 1928, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Times.) Investigating the origin of “ howls ” yt.nnil “ squeals ” that have disturbed the 'lteace of the Government, Mr Coates, as Premier, safeguarded by two Ministerial colle«\gues and attended by a retinue of private secretaries, engineering experts, and press reporters, has traversed the irrigated and non-irrigable tracts of Otago Central without coming upon anyone who would confess to howling and squealing. Here and there he came upon settlers who had neglected to pay their irrigation water-rate, and “ on inside information ” told them so. Yet, from more than one free-speaking interview he departed to the impromptu chorus “ For he’s a jolly good fellow! ” Mr Coates is advancing*his education. Life among the mild-eyed melancholy lotos eaters of the North is enervating; a hugger-mugger existence in Wellington Government Offices is narrowing. In Irish phrase—and there are Irishmen who helped to make Central Otago—he has met there “ a bould pisantry, their country’s pride,” a hardy race, and enduring.

Also lie will have learned some facts in natural philosophy; for one thing, that water will not run uphill, nor indeed downhill when a scant rainfall leaves the farmer paying, or failing to pay, for irrigation races that do not irrigate. I have a West Coast correspondent who assures me that in rivers flowing north or south, in the Nile and the Mississippi for instance, water does actually run uphill, climbs the bulging curvature of the earth. Does the river Molyneux come under this nonsensetheory? There is no telling. What I personally have to say about the river Molyneux is that engineering science should accept it as a great natural water race, constant, inexhaustible, and should crowd it with current-wheelers pumping automatically night and day, every fanner within reach having a pipe-line of his own to turn on and off at will. In days gone by current-wheel dredges tore up the river bottom, lifting goldbearing dirt by the ton. How much more easily might current-wheel pumps suck up and force through milelong pipes the flowing water. Amateur engineering! lam not proud of it, but let the regular practitioners prove it wrong.

“He regretted that the hall was not to be ready till next March. It would have pleased him at the end of the year to get 3000 of bis electors into it and secure their support, and he would have had a chance of being elected again. ’ Thus Mr Downie Stewart at the °Town Hall Foundation Stone Laying. “ A chance of being elected again ! ” —he needn’t worry. Nor need we. If our losing the services in Parliament of the Minister of Finance and his colleague the Speaker were a possibility, we should worry greatly. Both are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. No constituency is more honourably or more efficiently re presented in Parliament than Dunedin City; we should be woefully “ left to oorsel’s ”if we forget it. We all felt gay at the laying of the foundation stone of a Dunedin Town Hall; —£90.000 (o’ thereabouts) the bill ;—money in hand to pay it, and not a penny borrowed; —four Ministers of the Crown in rapt amaze at finding themselves in a land thus owing with milk and honey : —all their expert ences of the favoured North put to shame ; —sorry only that they were denied the privilege of volunteering a Government grant. But the credit for all this is not ours alone. There were those who went before us. More than one speaker was constrained to reflect that other men have laboured, and w® have entered into their labours.

Labour Playing the Fool: —The Christchurch City Council, in which there is a Labour majority, has decided to “ remove from the city reserves all guns and trophies of war,” —the guns to be sunk in the Avon probably, the “ trophies,” whatever they may be, to the nearest rubbish tip. Next step in a consistent policy, the pulling down of war memorials erected in honour of the dead ; next, the appropriating of Armistice Day for labouj union picnics; next again—and perhaps the force of folly can no further go —the suppressing of Returned Soldiers and the banning of the name. Not that these idiocies are without precedent. In the years that followed Waterloo the word was —as now—No more war! and amongst other extremes of foolishness it was proposed to suppress the United Service Club on the ground that it was “ likely Io foster the military spirit.” We paid dearly for this madness when Fate plunged us, ruinously unready, into the Crimean War. If, according to the hope of Mr Holland, destiny reserves for us a Labour majority in Parliament, the warships will be sent away, military training will be abolished. And if piratical invaders with ships and guns should arrive, being so manifestly invited,

Will ye pray them, or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back from your shore? Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more? asks Kipling. “ Yes!” is the fatuous answer; —‘‘Pretty neatly that, —we have at command a paralysing word. Our labour unions will declare the invasion “ black ! ” From Kokako Native School, Hawke’s Day : — Dear “ Civis,” —Can you enlighten me as to the real meaning of the word “trapezium”? In the Twentieth Century Dictionary it is “ a plane figure having four unequal sides no two of which are parallel. In Hall and Stevens’s School Geometry it is “ a quadrilateral which has one pair of parallel sides.” Which is right? You helped me once before on the matter of “ whale ” and “ wale,” “ which ” and “ witch,” etc., and I thank you for making the matter so plain, even though I could not convince my English friends. Thanking you in anticipation of your valued help now. “My valued help”—yes; from metaphysics and mathematics to “ Shakespeare and the musical glasses,” this column boasts itself an oracle; — “ Enquire within upon everything.’-’ Right or wrong—it doesn’t matter which —I usually contrive to have the last word.

“ Trapezium ” —a definition wanted. It is hardly worth while. The word is useless in geometry, and, geometrically considered, may be defined in any way you like. “ Trapeza ” is a table; “ trapez.ion,” diminutive, whence “ trapezium ” is a little table. But, strictly, neither means' more than “ a four-footer,” —just that, since “ peza ” is a foot and the other element in the word is a numeral. And so for science purposes the authorities do as they like with it. Hall and Stevens, whose School Geometry is an accepted text-book, say that “a trapezium is a four-sided figure which has two of its sides parallel”; whilst the best dictionaries saj that it is “ a four-sided figure no two of whose sides are parallel.” But the Concise Oxford Dictionary, better than the earlier best, accepts the discrepancy and bids you choose: — “ trapezium, four-sided plane figure of which no two (also, only two) sides are parallel.” You may believe either or both. Talk of “ terminological inexactitude ”! I repeat that “ trapezium ” is not wanted. “ Qus drilateral ” in intelligible, tells you at least that the has four sides, whereas “ trapezium ” tells you nothing to any purpose; ant “quadrilateral,” wit l a supplementary word or two would do all the work. ‘ Hall and Stevens in their propositions, theorems, and exercises seem to be of that opinion.

I can always find a corner for “ howlers ” of merit. He e are a few taken from recent English papers. Each one of them is worthy of thought:—The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the east and the sun sets in the west. The Minister of War is the clergyman who preaches to the soldiers in barracks. Shakespeare lived at Windsor with his merry wives. The King wore a scarlet robe trimmed with vermin. Average means something that hens lay their eggs on. Algebraical symbols are rued when you don’t know what you are talking about. Transparent means something you can -see through—for instance a keyhole. Ambiguity means telling the truth when you don't want to.

Gravity tells us why the apple docsn t go to heaven. Artificial perspiration is what you make a person live with when they are only just dead. L’o cap these, take a howler of local origin:— Balliol, the same as Belial, a college at Oxford; hence Sons of Belial; also the name Bell, as in Bel and the Dragon, and in the class rooms of Otago University—“ the moaning and groaning of the Bells” (Edgar Allen Poe). Certainly there are Bells and Bells on the professorial staff of the Otago University. How many? I haven’t counted them;—quite a chime of Bells anvhow, and a melodious chime, let us ‘hope. Moaning and groaning mav be the students’ part. Civis.