Listening While I Work (11)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 237, 7 January 1944, Page 7

Listening While I Work (11)

By

Materiamilias

ARMTH and sunshine are demoralising. Sitting under the shade of a cherry tree on a warm Sunday afternoon I began to deplore the sense of duty that lays its hands so remorselessly on programme organisers. For the radio was on-a pleasant orchestral programme sicklied over with the title "Garden of Melody"-gardens have vegetables and weeds as well as flowers-and this was followed by another pleasant musical half-hour of something equally noncommital. But I knew that sooner or later the peace would be broken and that I would be forced from my indolence either to listen to a talk which I had no wish to hear or to stir myself sufficiently to turn off the radio. Who wants to hear talks, I thought, and who to prepare them? No one; but because it is someone’s business, it has to be done, even when no one has anything special to say or tell or teach.

ID I turn it off? Well, actually I didn’t. I prepared to do so. The title "The Lord Chancellor of Dictionaries," or something of the sort, did not attract me. But it was about the Oxford Dictionary, and I have such a fondness for the Oxford that though I rose discourteously to switch off, I stayed to listen. By far the most interesting part of the talk to me were the words added year by year to the English language. Words I could have imagined in the mouth of my grandfather were heard first as late as 1910. Each list seemed in itself to hold crystallised the spirit of its year. Which was the year of "jazz," "vamp," "lipstick,’ which of "Nazi," "gestapo"; or of "encirclement" and "appeasement"? We might trace a graph of our amusements, social habits, dance fashions, economic and political changes from the year that brought "boloney" to the year that brought "blitz." There seemed an unexplored field of potential interest in this, and I grudged the time given to unimportant biographical details about Sir James Murray who, though the most important, was, after all, only one of the editors of the Dictionary. te he £ =

ANP why must a literary talk have illustrative music? In this case there was, I think, a Border Song because Murray came from the Border country. Was it to give the speaker a rest or to ease the listener? Neither should need it. ;