Aw investigation conducted in Ivew York by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's engineers, who listened-i'n to telephone circuits over which business calls predominated, gave startling results regarding the decline in conversational English. Of 79,380 words recorded, 30 simple words—principally the personal pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and a few verbs—made up nearly half. More astonishing still/is the fact that 155 words, including the 30 already mentioned, made up more than 80 per,cent. Grammarians will, be horrified to learn that I! shall" was heard only six times; while "yeah," "uhhuh" and "erj" were plentiful and the grunts and monosyllabic replies recorded ran into the thousands. A shilling advertisement in the classified section of Thb Pkbss will seli yonr goods. Try H. M words Is. threa insertion# 9s 6d. •—6
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19301204.2.50.4
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20102, 4 December 1930, Page 9
Word count
Tapeke kupu
127Page 9 Advertisements Column 4 Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20102, 4 December 1930, Page 9
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Press. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Acknowledgements
Ngā mihi
This newspaper was digitised in partnership with Christchurch City Libraries.