SLANG IN SPEECH

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 348, 8 May 1928, Page 8

SLANG IN SPEECH

HAVING had a succession of critics assail the quality of New Zealand let us take heart of grace from Professor Maxwell Walker, who defends the manner in which New Zealanders tongue the King’s English. The professor’s opinion is that New Zealand compares more than favourably in speech with other parts of the Empire. Many New Zealanders will rejoice to hear it. They had their doubts. The “characteristic accent,” which everybody detects but ourselves, is, says the professor, due to the universal fault of inertia—more brutally to put it, to laziness and carelessness, insufficient attention being paid to voice culture. It is hers that the new primary school syllabus sings a song of hope, with the promise of fuller attention being paid the culture of English, both oral and written, with special stress on pronunciation. At present, says Professor Walker, lawyers, school-teachers and even clergymen are careless in speech. It is very sad. It might be expected that public speakers, such as politicians, would make a point of mastering the language. But a seat in the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Representatives for one brief hour will convince anybody that members of Parliament are not elected for their knowledge of English, or for their methods of expressing what they do know. The truth is that, as the professor has said, from the highest to the lowest, we are linguistically lazy. And nobody seems to care much, despite frequent criticism. No one takes the critic seriously-—and Americanisms continue to swell the vocabulary. Indeed it is difficult for some people to refrain from writing the language as they talk it. How would the free and easy public regard a serious speech reformer? He wouldn’t make any hoot by lecturing; and, if he were an outsider, lie would probably be chatted as to why he came here to stieky-beak on our speech. It would be a dead cert that he would be regarded as on a stunt to grab the oof, and, for a stone moral, he would have a few of the lads put it over him. Not even a native, such as Mr. Coates, would be able to hand this sort of stuff across; he wouldn’t stand Buckley’s, even among the heads. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the Prime Minister would be melon enough to trot out such a lemon; he has other things to get a move on over, and would declare it pure punk to propose he should Nosey Parker into other Guys’ gossip. There are far too few pure-speech fans to make a welter of such a stunt, and it would be ’tote odds on a dead ’un that it would crash.