SPOKEN ENGLISH

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 425, 9 January 1933, Page 7

SPOKEN ENGLISH

MODERN GHANGES . DAY OF GRAMMATICAL PUR1STS FAST GOING A GREATER FREEDOM In the convention of the National Council of Teachers of English at Memphis there was an interesting and a lively discussion of English as she is spoke and as the severe grammar writer tell us she would be written (comments an American journal). One soon learns the baselessness of some of the rules that these pendants have made. One speaker at Memphis properly condemned such "delusions" about good English as the commandment, still meekly obeyed by many, not to begin a sentence with "and" or "but." He wondered if the purists "ever read any English." A healthy language is always growing and changing, discarding and adding, promoting slang into respect- | ability, doing, in short, as it pleases. It seems curious that so sound and Shakespearean a form as "I had rather" should even be requir id to pass an examination; but grammatical consciences are delicate. Many of the old superstitions haye heen oulived, save by a few belated preeisions. * Splitting the infinite has even become a favourite exercise; and when a gentleman of such polished surface as Mr. Osbert Sitwell joins the splitters the waning prunes-and-prisms school has new cause to wail. Not that one need go out of his way and split for the salce of splitting, but he should split when the scission 1 is natural. The divergencies of talk | from writing got a good deal of atI tention from the teachers. Here ! there can be no exaet canon. A stui dent of the dictionary, however, will j notice what a multitude of words, ; superciliously stamped "colloquial," | have made their way or are making ! it into the company of distinguished | authors. : Teachers feel bound to be more | careful than the rest of us, and slowi er to accept expressions that drop | instinctively from the common ton- | gue. It is refreshing to see that the j Memphians approve the phrase, "Who ' are you looking for?" As a matter of fact and statistics, who says "whom" in that and similar phrases? A novelist has to use the nominative in his dialogue for the sake of verisimilitude. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this university of usage will force itself into the more. formal

wntten speech. ahouid tne signs along the road that tell us to "Go Slow" read "Go Slowly"? They should not. It is queer to reeall that Shakespeare could use "slow" as an adverb and could also write "fastly." To save hreath and time, or for whatever reason, "fastly" was cashiered. "Slowly" should go with it into the home for retired adverbs. "It is me," a construetion of almost invariably spoken usage and corroborated by idioms in other languages, was accepted, as it should have heen, at Memphis. What is the use of drilling children to use cold canned forms that they will never hear at home and that most cultivated persons never employ unless they are obliged now and then to put on conversational "company manners?" The English language is for those who use it. It's no use to set beadles at the door to keep out intruders and tramps whose looks they do not like. Many of the rascals will get in. They may have their period of probation and then become pinks of propriety, only in some later generation to be marked "obsolete" or "low." The intentions of the beadles are of the best, but the lustiest vagabonds will always "crash the gate."