SCHOOLBOY HOWLERS.

Putaruru Press, Volume VI, Issue 226, 1 March 1928, Page 3

SCHOOLBOY HOWLERS.

SOME CLASSIC EXAMPLES. Youth’s Delightful Faculty. They answered everything they could, And wrote with all their might, But, though they wrote it all by rote, They did not write it right. Lewis Carroll, “ The Vulture and the Husbandman.” Blithe and irresponsible youth’s delightful faculty for getting hold of an edisode by the wrong end, and its bracing defiance of most of the rules of reason, have created in recent years a vogue for collecting specimens of the schoolboy howler, and so popular has the fashion become that a normally sedate journal, the University Correspondent, now offers annual prizes for the best collection of new examples. A generation ago there was a similar vogue for “ Spoonerisms ” —those ludicrous forms of metathesis that consist of transposing the initial sounds of words so as to form amusing combinations, such, for example, as “ we all know what it is to have a half-warmed fish within us ” (for “ half-formed wish”). The hero of these inversions, or at any rate, the person to whom they are invariably ascribed, was the Rev. W. A. Spooner, Warden of |New College, Oxford, and it has been alleged that his grave and learned colleagues of the University used to spend happy summer afternoons; in their College gardevising new and original Spoonerisms, which were subsequently fathered upon the Warden of New and disseminated joyously from the High Tables. When, later, there was a revival of taste for “ Limericks,” those nonsense verses originally popularised in the middle of last century by Edward Lear, some of the more presentable examples also seem suggestive of a college garden origin, as, for instance, the one about that marine monster, the Plesisaurus, who Fainted with shame When he first heerd his name And departed long ages before us. Perhaps too, the college garden may have given birth to one or two schoolboy howlers, such as the attribution to Oliver Cromwell of Wolsey’s “ Had I but served my Gods as I have served my King I would not be in this predicament now,” and the malicious assertion that the reason why a lie never passed the lips of George Washington was because, being an American, he spoke through his nose. The translation of Splendide Mendax into “ Lying in State ” seems also to warrant inclusion amongst the garden produce. Smith Minor Scores. Before reviewing those recent aberrations of Smith minor which have a claim to preservation under a glass case, respectful homage must first be paid to the anonymous schoolboy’s masterly definition of a friend as “ one who knows you and likes you all the same ” —surely as apt a definition as was ever evolved in college garden or elsewhere. One must concede that here Smith minor plainly scores.

The genus boy usually proves himself free from those feelings of superstitious reverence for history and mythology with which grown-ups are frequently encumbered. Indeed, howler records are strewn with the wreckage of both these subjects. Here, for example, a bulwark of English history which had stood the stress of centuries is utterly shattered: “ When Sir Philip Sidney lay dying before Zutphen, a greviously wounded soldier lay near him, and when a bowl of water was brought to the soldier, Sidney, with that promptitude which marks the doings of all great heroes, seized it and drank it, saying, ‘My need is greater than thine.’ ” Frailties of spelling sometimes produce surprising results. In an essay on the Normans a boy wrote: “ William had a New Forest maid, and he killed everyone who chased his dear,” and one is bewildered into a kind of stunned admiration for “ Bacchus first taught the Greeks to get drunk, and Raleigh named tobacco after him in honour of the Virgin Queen.” Our schoolboy friend, too, sometimes restores touches to history that it has almost lost in the perspective of so many years, thus: “ Wolsey’s fate is attributed to his having shot at the Pope ” (text-book reading—“ aimed at the Papacy ”). In the realms of mythology the following are entitled to a place in the sun: “ Achilles was dipped by his mother in the River Styx, and when he came out he was unbearable.” “ Psyche was a black boxer who fought Carpentier,” and “ Charon fried soles over the sticks.”

Pitfalls in Translation. Translations from the dead languages are always fruitful. De mortuis nil nisi bonum has produced as an English version, “ There’s nothing but bones in the dead Ne plus ultra, “ There’s nothing beyond Ulster”; and “ Tertium quid is a legal term meaning 6s Bd.” There have been many definitions of marriage, some illuminating, some bitter, some humorous, some true, but it has remained for a schoolboy to blunder into the most crudely cynical one on record, thus: “Acrimony (sometimes called holy) is another name for marriage.” One seems to trace the hand of the same cynical young ruffian in “ The Court of Chancery is so called because it takes care of property when there is no chance of the owner turning up.” “ Britain has a temporary climate,” and in the definition of “ ambiguity ” as “ telling the truth when you don’t mean to.”

Spelling and pronunciation often combine to dig a pit for schoolboys. Hence “ a fugue is what you get in a room full of people when all the windows and doors are shut.” Those who are aware of the generous proportions of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, the “ boy poet,” in “ Chesterton committed suicide at Bristol. He was only nineteen and very thin and hungry.” The confused idea, too, comes out well in “ A glazier is a man who runs up and down mountains,” and in “ the people of Iceland are called Equinnoxes,” while Wordsworth would have been highly astonished to learn that he wrote “ The Imitations of Immorality.” Smith Minor Puts His Foot Down. The schoolboy, as a rule, is persistently and cheerfully tolerant. His mind is not haunted by the ghosts of antique prejudices, but occasionally he has to put his foot down. The question was “ What are the following, and what would you do for them?” and included in the list was “ Rabies.” Smith minor’s answer was “ Rabies are Jewish priests. I should do nothing for them.” In the field of miscellaneous “ information ” a number of collectors’ specimens may be found. “ A grass widow ” for instance, “ is the wife of a dead vegetarian,” “ Letters in sloping print are hysterics,” “ Guy’s Hospital was built to commemorate the gunpowder plot,” “ Oceana is that Continent which contains no land,” “ Mephistopheles was a Greek comic poet,” and “ Evolution is what Darwin did, Revolution is a form of government abroad, Devolution is something to do with Satan.” A mathematical problem is swept out of the way with a magnificent gesture in the definition, “ Things .which are equal to the same thing are equal to anything else,” but it would require an expert psychologist to explain the tortuousness of “ A circle is a rounded figure made up of a crooked straight line bent so as the ends meet.” One feels in this instance that our friend Smith minor, in the words of old . Sir Thomas Overbury, “ha taken paines to be an Asse.” There is, however, a directness beautiful in its simplicity about

“ the plural of forget-me-not is for-get-us-not.” “ Ne one has yet succeeded in edifying the dark lady of the sonnets,” writes a Shakespearean student, but, unhappily, this does not illuminate the obscurity in which the dark lady is involved, and she remains one of the world’s unsolved problems, together with Who wrote the Letters of Junius ? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? and How much wood would a woodchuck chuck is a woodchuck could chuck wood ? Finally, let me offer a charming paraphrase. The passage to be paraphrased was: “ O God of Battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts, possess them not with fear,” and the answer, “ O Mars, rob my soldiers of their hearts, and don’t be afraid to keep them.”