DO YOU KNOW

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 301, 21 December 1933, Page 2

DO YOU KNOW

The Smock Shop (Aliss Saunders) will be open to-day, to-morrow and Saturday. “ AMAZING “ AWFUL” EXAGGERATION DEPLORED “There is something vacuous, unintelligent and disproportionate about the conventional phraseology of so many young women who claim social superiority or fashionable distinction,” said the Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, in addressing the pupils of the Marsden Diocesan Girls’ School, Wellington. “Such words as ‘amazing,’ ‘marvellous’ and ‘colossal’ on the one hn”d, and ‘awful,’ ‘terrible’ and ‘devastating’ on th e other, are frequently on their tongues in reference to very ordinary events and still more ordinary individuals, and their constant use tends to breed, through exaggeration, inaccuracy and insincerity in their uttcrcrs, and lack of conviction in their hearers. “Ours is a beautiful language, rich in Tvords and phrases applicable to all the tones and semi-tones, the crescendos, diminuendos, the chords and the arpeggios of human experience. Can we not use it more carefully in our daily conversation? There is nothing old-fashioned or ‘early Victorian’ in clinging to the cultured phraseology 1 of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of Sir Walter Scott, or of Edmund Burke. “I should like,” His Excellency added, “to rec a mortey box provided in every leading secondary school and in the home of every well-educated family in this Dominion into w r hlch a penny would be placed for some charitable object every time that a member of the household used a word of flagrant exaggeration or slang.”