How's Your Accent?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 376, 6 September 1946, Page 28

How's Your Accent?

RITERS to The Listener who have been in danger of working themselves into a literary lather over "ack-sent" have apparently not heard the new language; or if they have, they haven’t studied it. Common usage makes many things acceptable, but when I

heard a tram conductor the other day announce loudly "Orfurplee," I pricked up my ears. "Orfurplee" he repeated when he came to my _ seat, and I gave him a shilling, for which I received a concession card. And everybody else knew what he meant, for there ‘was the cash, ready for his little leather bag.

A dozen or so passengers got on at the next stop. "Mooightlongto centre plss; plennyoom fawl." Was this Welsh? "Orfurplee,’ and again, "Mooightlong." They paid, obeyed, and crowded into the centre space. It couldn’t have been Welsh. This strange tongue does not appear | in any dictionary, yet some of us use it and all of us understand it. It has its variations. I met one when, in a crowded | tram, I was slow in digging threepence from a vest pocket. The conductor looked at me sharply and exploded, "Fizz, Orfizz." Before catching the tram home that evening, I heard anguished cries from a small boy. I thought of the ambulance, but listened again. "Eee-erk, Eeenunpapuh." They came from the side of a mouth which was twisted with pain. But, | being a New Zealander, I knew that that boy was only anxious that I should take homie one of his evening papers. Even bus-drivers have adopted the new speech. Boarding a suburban bus the other night I was asked "Whereoo?" And the driver showed no surprise when I caught on. But is this queer tongue so. new after all? "Remember the whitecoated youths who strolled up and down the aisles at the interval in the picture show, calling "Swoits, isecreamsandswoits?" And at the circus, "Chokkuets an peenuts, pennybag." And you may remember also the salesman on the railway car whose "Chokluts, magzeens, cirarets,’ caused eyes to brighten, conversation to take on a new lease of life and boredom to vanishtemporarily. : Parade-Ground Patois And it is only a year or so since we had to translate our sergeant-major’s "Guard will unfizz nitz-‘fizz Nitz," whereupon we unfixed our bayonets, Equally individualistic in his style of speech was the drill sergeant whose "Stunnit zzzzzzz" stood us at our ease, and whose "Slo........ Parmz!" found us tangled in the sling.

More recently, and nearer home, some visiting seamen, noisy with ale, were annoyed when the restaurant waitress bypassed their table. Their comments about lack of service grew ‘louder. A passing policeman looked in and opened his little black book and his inquiries with, "Wossolthis?"’ Now, as those visitors knew what he meant, for their excuses

were immediately ready, this new language cannot. be wholly well made New Zealand. But the _ other afternoon, came the most curious linguistic phenomenon of all. A soberly-dressed little man with a beard muttered into it at a street corner, "Get your art union tikkut ’ere; moight .be yore

lucky day." Perfect diction perfectly intelligible, and now that I come to think of it, he probably wasn’t one of us at all. Surely a displaced person from far

overseas.

E.R.

B.