GOOD ENGLISH

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 131, 24 August 1927, Page 5

GOOD ENGLISH

When the Dean of St. Paul's spoke most entertainingly at the luncheon given by the London Society of Women Journalists recently, he gave some very sound advice about using good English, and urged writers to remember that they are the trustees of the language, and must guard it accordingly. There may have been present some who heard this advice unmoved. They must have been the rare people who never fall into the temptation to use slang In print, to make short cuts to their literary destination, and to work to death an already much maltreated word. Those which came in for specially severe criticism were ■‘meticulous" and "intrigued," and .10 doubt most of us registered a vow to omit these words from anything we might write, even though they supplied a lazy person with a useful crutch and saved the mental effort of finding another and perhaps simpler word. Probably it occurs to comparatively few writers to think of themselves as having a sacred trust in the matter of good English, but there are a good many whose work shows that they do realise the dignity of the language, for they preserve it jealously from the intrusion of slip-shod expressions and catch phrases. I wonder that the Dean did not include “geste” among the dreadful words which have spread like weeds through the columns of the newspapers, and will he not lead a crusade against the set phrases which are unkindly referred to as "journalese" (itself an offence against the language) ? A short story by O. Henry, (he American writer, tells of a message sent by a war correspondent who omitted well-known words from hackneyed phrases, until, by replacing these words, the men at the other end were able to give a detailed report in spite of the authorities!