Why the Porter Resiped

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 637, 13 April 1929, Page 18

Why the Porter Resiped

Cross Words in Wales . . . A Small Town with a Large Name . -

■a L ANFAIRPWLLGW YXGI J L LGOGERCHW YRNDR 1 S OB WLLLLANDYSILIO j * GOGOGOCH —That, according to a Welsh mem- ! ] her of Parliament, is not j the right way to spell it. Two syllables of the name, he told the House j of Commons, are here placed in the wrong order. Perhaps it was the misspelling that made the House so ! hilarious, when. th.e name of the village w r as mentioned in a question addressed to the Postmaster-General. Every reader of “Punch” knows how funny even the most trifling mistake in spelling can be. At the same time, I suspect that in its correct spelling the name of Llanfairpwllgwyn, etc., would have seemed equally comic to Englishmen, and possibly to Welshmen. It is a dachshund of a word elongated almost to infinity, and even an ordinary dachshund is rather funny, writes “Y.Y.” in the “New Statesman.” It is difficult to say at what point a word begins to grow funny because of its length. Remove one letter after another from the end of this Welsh word, and at what point will it cease to be funny? Even take away the second half of the word, and it will still be ridiculous. It is a word that you could not possibly work into a son- i

■ net. nor could you begin a w- , version of -The Deserted Viilaof I the line: ’ n «l j Sweet J-lanUiirpn ob u'l/lllhi lain siloffogogoch. village of the plain. The Welsh are a raee of bard, I doubt if they have ever invented metre which could contain the n, 1 of this village, the i which has given notice of his resin, 01 tion. Even in free verse the would look just a little absurd i scarcely looks right in a page of mon prose. The Welsh. 1 fancy, have preserve it mainly as an attraction for tourten I am sure that no Welshman Ito another Welshman ever rolls n 7, that horrid and disordered alphabet' No nation could survive which real]' gave places names like that. In these days of keen competition, it i s race with the short words that n-L Names of undue length are an c.k struction to business whether on tb« railways, in the post office, or in th« houses of commerce. Presumably, then, it was a Welsh humorist who invented the name b order to give visitors something to wonder at. If I remember right, when ! I was iu Wales many years ago. you could buy the name on a sheet of paper for a penny, and. If you Were a stranger, you did. It was a csri. osity, worthy of being added to the seven wonders of the world. Preeuni. ably, it is the longest word in tinworld, and the longest word in the world is in its own way as interesting as the longest river in the world or the highest mountain or the large,-, lake. If you were told that the tailed tree in the world was in a Surrey wood, you would drive out to see it with the liveliest curiosity. You aud thousands of others would stand gaiing at it simply through a passion for the superlative. The superlatively big and the superlatively little—each of them stirs us into wonder. We are ail victims of the love of the odd, and many people would go further to see a man nine feet high or with three eyes than to talk with Socrates. Yet always in the end we return for repose to the normal. An excess of excess wearies us. If a n places had names like the unpronounceable Welsh village, we should be bored and not interested. The truth is, the name has no virtue bnt that of uniqueness. It is. as Johnson said of Gray, merely dull in a new way.