The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1941 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 140, 11 August 1941, Page 4

The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1941 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

IN New Zealand, where so many overseas visitors have remarked on the purity of the' spoken English, we are also prone to the not over-praiseworthy habit of inventing and adopting as legitimate, a multitudinous number of words and expressions which ca,n only be described as "slang.' During last war this "colonial freedom of language" influenced to quite a large extent the English vocabulary at the very heart of Empire, and many expressions born in younger lands, where conditions differed vastly, have now become legalised in the English tongue. According to some, these new words and phrases were more potent of meaning and more expressive than the actual ones they were meant to qualify, and for this reason quickly gained general recognition and usage which, after all, is the first step towards making them legitimate. In view of this, it is interesting to hear that one of the troubles with the well of contemporary English, according to Professor J. Dover Wilson, of London University, is that so much of its. contents is stale. When the conversational bucket is dropped down, it on'ly too frequently brings up water that has been used many times before. Instead of inventing fresh and original phrases, says the profesor, people clothe their thoughts in words and locutions worn thread-bare by use Formerly they would say of a person that he came "in the nick of time"; now, that he arrives at "the psychological moment." And that is a cliche. The ardent modernist will immediately point out that "in the nick of time" is also a cliche. But doubtless it could be answered that this phrase was once a bright and arresting metaphor, while the other was never anything but a dull and cumbrous classicism. Still, the modernist need not so easily admit defeat. If people to-day employ cliches, so did they always. Who has not been offered a penny for his thoughts? Of many a young girl who might have bought a copy of the first edition of "Paradise Lost" it was said that "she looked as if butter would not melt in her mouth." "Enough's as good as a feast' was a trite and hackneyed expression during the youth of the great Duke of Marlborough, whose life his descendant, Mr Winston Churciiill h'as lately been engaged in writing. After all, it is difficult to keep one's speech entirely on the gold standard. Cliches "(in strict moderation) form a very handy kind of conversational small change. And if they have not altered much down the centuries, that only shows their usefulness. A new country such as ours, with its mode of living, its climate and its interests so entirely removed from those in the Motherland, must automatically coin new words, yet despite these compelling reasons we find the steady persistency of those age-old Engilish expressions, which no doubt cause our visitors to. feel more at home.in the Dominion than in any other part of the Empire.