Noxious Words

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 124, 7 November 1941, Page 4

Noxious Words

ROSSLY though our deeds belie us, we find ourselves in almost complete sympathy with the correspondent who writes to us to-day from Central Otago. Nor is it a case of wallowing in the muddy waters of repentance. We are ashamed, but we shall sin again. We are not strong enough to save ourselves. A hundred push us down the slope for every one who tries, like our correspondent, to arrest our descent. We know that we shall go on sliding and that the pit below us has no bottom. The most we can do is to thank him as we slip out of his hands. Some of the words that he charges us with using he calls "pure vermin." That is kind. Others he describes as hybrids. That is polite. Still others he calls "filthy," and we can certainly not say that they are clean. But our correspondent is a farmer, lucky man. With good fences, vigilance, and some luck, he can prevent mongrel invasion of his stock paddocks and exercise some control at least over his crops. He is not exposed as © we are, to what Fowler calls invasion from © every direction-from above, from below, and from all sides, as well as from the centre -and is not left as we are without clear warning when the enemy comes. We are journalists and not philologists. We work in a hurry. We have sometimes to take what we are given. Sometimes we know, sometimes we do not know, that the sheep we hurry along is a goat. We are far more likely to be watching the clock than the goat’s breech or muzzle. We know, too, that in the evolution of words goats become sheep if they live long enough. In addition, we are New Zealanders. We know that language can be too pure, speech too perfect, pronunciation too English. The laws of language are not laws but conventions; temporary agreements; and to cling too ‘long to them is to trade in superstitions. How soon a radio technician may safely become a radiotrician no one at present can say; but it should not take as long as it took cadets to become cads, or mobile vulgus to become the mob. We take comfort also from the warning issued a few years ago in Moscow (and repeated in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language) that "Oxford English is an aristocratic tongue fosteréd by the governing classes to maintain their icy and lofty exclusiveness." There is something to be said for the combination of carelessness and ignorance that keeps ninety-nine out of every hundred New Zealanders in the same cart,