THE AGE OF TOSH.

Shannon News, 12 April 1927, Page 1

THE AGE OF TOSH.

SERIOUS FOOLERY. COMMON SENSE DISCOUNTED. It is unfortunate that the worldconsumption of Tosh is increasing-' instead of diminishing, but its manufacture is obviously such a paying business and its super-efficient advertising ?o greedily swallowed by the public that it is hardly to be wondered at. And• tl.en, the speciality of the Tosh merchant, like a certain well-known 1 paper, is "on sale everywhere," writes Major L, A. M Jones in the. London "Sunday Herald." We seem to revel in being consumers of Tosh. At the average social function how much of our talk is anything else. We dance it, we listen tc it in our theatres; we blink stupidly at it in our kiuemas, and our books avd periodicals are too often full of it in a concentrated form. The otii3r night I met a certain mar on his way home from the theatre, where lie had been to see the late-it play .... "the one that everybody is talking about." When I asked him what he thought of it —for he is a clever man and the world sets considerable value on his opinion of contemporary things—he said: "It was Tosh!" TWO. KINDS. Tosh may be said to be of two descriptions—the 1 harmless and the dcious.' The first is merely a useless waste of time, the other is morbid. A good example of the harmless kind, in print, is a public discussion as to wether gnttiug herrings or topping turnips is the colder job in' winter! The perverted eroticism of certain writers of novels typifies the second variety; : Let me make it clear at once that light-hearted Fun and Tosh are as-dif-ferent from one another : ermine is .from white-rabbit fur. - A sense of humour is something to be thankful for. The Tosh addict has no sen&'eof "humour, or he would ' bo the first : to laugh at-himself. Occato play the fool is an excellent thing —so long- as we realise that

we arj doing so. It is when we do it seriously that it is dangerous A professor of logic at one of our universities said to me recently that the humorous' "corner" of a certain great London daily-generally provided the cleverest and saw st reading in the whole paper. "For a short time each day," he said, "those whimsical pars make life happier and brighter for ninny thousands cf people just as the Charlie Chaplin'', films did for the lads at the front during the war. " "COMEG FILMS." But what is to be said of the flabby, bacly-written ' < Pennyjdradf ul" seri- , als provided for our .jjeading on the way to and from office? Or of many of the so-called comic films presented for our evening amusement. That they are accepted (apparently without protest) leaves one aghast at the power of the Toshmonger and painfully amazed at the foolishness of a people whose strongest national trait used to be sound common sense.. The present craze, for ■;■ smut and trash is 'ar sign,: for- \it seems to point" to" something being wrong with our sensible English minds. If it were not so, we should insist upon virile English filtos, boycott the pungent • and demand the immediate and efficient segregation of all quasi-Englishmcn in the pay of Moscow-, r -... .*, >«• *«. *■• «*-.-.,. . ■