SLANG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 65, 20 September 1940, Page 5

SLANG

Sir,-I have listened to Mr. Sidney Baker’s talks on Slang, and have read the extracts therefrom published in The Listener. The experience has been interesting, if not entirely edifying. I am left wondering why anyone should expend so much time, energy, and skill in an effort to preserve and classify a host of misbegotten verbal monstrosities that in a saner world would have been strangled at birth, In saying this I am of course making a distinction (which Mr. Baker has not been careful to make), between the enrichment of our language by the addition of new words coined to express new ideas, and the adoption, to its hurt, of the uncouth and senseless inventions that are merely the offspring of vulgarity and affectation-two qualities that have nitch in common. Why should useful and necessary words: such as radio, Anzac, stockyard, candy, and swagman be thrust into the same category as abominations like snorter, snitcher, wonky, beaut, and stagger-soup? These are a few of the words used by Mr. Baker in his talks, and used, it seems to me, with so little discrimination as between good and bad that he leaves the whole issue confused, and does himself less than justice, Many listeners must have been uncomfortably astonished to learn how varied and how vicious are our habits of speech, but Mr, Baker himself seems unperturbed, and can regard with equanimity and

perhaps a little admiration the use by New Zeae landers in London of the word "bush" to describe the suburbs of that great city. Much that he has told us has no relation to slang at all, and some of that, under a different title, might have made a useful contribution to our knowledge of the growth of honest English words. But in the main Mr. Baker’s talks have left the impression of a keen but regrettable desire on his part to "pay an ungrudging tribute" to the "delightful and inspired" souls who debase the current coin of speech in order to satisfy an urge to be conspicuously "different" at whatever cost of being noticeably objectionable. It is all rather pitiable. Mr. Baker mentions the word "echelon" as now used in New Zealand. It is not slang; just a pleasant word with a definite meaning of its own, but no more descriptive of a contingent for overseas than would be the term "countermarch" or "right wheel." The complaisant acceptance of this innovation by the ft

whole body of the press and public of the country is perhaps the sorriest surrender in our history. But in such ways, apparently, is our language "developed."

and I suppose we must leave it at that-

J.W.

B.

(Kelburn).

(As Mr. Baker is no longer in New Zealand, we have had to decide between suppressing fair and intelligent criticism and publishing an attack to which there can be no immediate reply. We have decided that the second is the smaller of the two evils, but we shall not print further letters on the subject unless they are in reply to "J.W.B.’s" letter.-Ed.)