QUICKENING A "DEAD" LANGUAGE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 26 September 1913, Page 3

QUICKENING A "DEAD" LANGUAGE.

An article which appeared in the Daily Mail recently about the growth of American slang in England, due ,to the moving-picture business, and which we have already referred to in our "Topics of the Day," has provoked a response in the editorial columns of the Detroit Journal, an American newspaper. "It reaily is sad," states the writer, "to think of all those living and virile words being htirled at a race of people speaking a dead language. For the English of many articles in the Daily Mail and in many other British periodicals is as dead as a Latin grammar. That list (of slang terms) includes some of the liveliest words ever created, and they are the very words needed for lively productions like moving pictures —that is why they are used. Kipling did not write English—he wrote the Cockney, the Yorkshire, the Irish and the Asiatic dialects of English. James M. Barrie writes not English? but 'braid Scots.' Arnold Bennett went to France for his style, and to the potters of the Five Towns for his living language. The conservative "English for which Mr Faulkner pleads is of no use in literature unless it is poeticised by a Corelli, .surcharged with sea-slang or border slang or French or some other living language by a Stevenson or a Doyle."