FROM THE TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 410, 19 July 1928, Page 10

FROM THE TOWER

By

“THE LOOK-OUT MAN."

SILHOUETTES OF THE SESSION

No. 5: The Hon. R. A. Wright Speaks often late at night. “The hour is getting late. Til wind up the debate.” STUDIES UNPOPULAR Class prejudice is said to be creeping into our universities. This would of course affect the attendance at lectures primarily, INHARMONIOUS RELATIONS A member of an orchestra has recently been figuring in the divorce court. Probably a performer on the eternal triangle. SIGN OF THE TIMES Continental dancing teachers, we are told by a women’s journal, are busy composing new steps for the 1928-29 season. A symbolical motive in keeping with the times will be a feature of the new dances. The L.O.M. is hoping that he will not be dragged into a set of mechanised lancers. TOO MUCH Is there to be no end to this quest for mechanical perfection? Is there to be no liberty of action left for the individual? Somebody has now invented a mechanical egg top cutter. I did think they would leave our eggs alone. In future, I suppose, our eggs will be served already decapitated, and one more little pleasure of the table will have been sacrificed on the altar of Science. At breakfast one always toys with an egg. It gives a pleasant send-off to another day. It enables one to collect one’s thoughts before plunging into the maelstrom. And there is the sense of adventure with an egg. At present one never knows. It may be and it may not be. . . . There is speculation, trepidation. But in future the discovery will be made by someone else. Life is becoming too colourless altogether. * * * MADE-TO-MEASURE CARS Massachusetts’s smallest automobile operator is H. A. Knowles, three feet and six inches tall. That is in America, where small cars are not usual. After an experience with a friend’s new English vest-pocket model, the L.O.M. considers that even the diminutive Knowles would be cramped for space. It is said that selfmeasurement charts are to be issued to prospective buyers of sports models. Dame Rumour is also whispering that the owners of small cars are uniting to combat the danger of Juggernaut pedestrians. STUDENTS’ STRAW HATS Now that Benito Mussolini has really got into his administrative stride, the world is accustomed to hear of edicts by II Duce which mostly strike people as singular. This summer—it’s sum-mer-time in Italy when it’s winter over here —straw hats have been made the compulsory headgear of Italian college students belonging to Fascist groups. The band colour denotes the “faculty" to which a student belongs. The L.O.M. has been wondering what would happen if New Zealand’s Minister of Education adopted the notions of the Fascisti. Black shirts and straw hats for Auckland university students!

SAVING A LANGUAGE A movement is on foot to establish a lectureship in Maori at the Auckland University College in the hope of saving the Maori- tongue which, experts say, is doomed to die within a century. The Maori tongue is a beautiful one and certainly worth saving, but it is not the only one in danger of extinction. Take Welsh. Mr. T. P. O’Connor has something of interest to sayon this subject: “I sometimes wonder,” he writes, “if Mr. David Dloyd George and other Welshmen are right in their insistence on the perpetuation and even the extension of the old Welsh tongue. I am afraid I am a hit of a sceptic on all these questions of reviving dead or dying languages. Sometimes I have been struck in the House of Commons by the fact that many of the Welsh members—those, of course, I mean who have been brought up hilingually—spoke English sometimes as though it had remained to them something of a foreign tongue. I have known but few Welsh Parliamentarians who seemed to speak with fluency. Even Mr. Lloyd George is somewhat hesitating in speech until he gets roused; then, of course, the words pour out in a passionate tornado. But I have always doubted— I hope I won’t offend any of my Welsh friends by this statement —if this bilingual training they got did not somev'hat embarrass and impede their full command of the English language."