Shall and Will

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 421, 18 July 1947, Page 11

Shall and Will

I INLESS one happened to be a grammarian or a foreigner-or of course a Viewsreel Commentator-one would not, I think, have made any special effort to take up one’s station by the radio at the hour of Professor Arnold Wall’s talk on "Shall and Will"? And yet some may even have been fooled by the very directness of the titleunable to believe that the Professor was really going to talk to them, so-called adult audiences, about when they should say "shall" and when they should say "will"? Many, on the other hand, may have been quite unprepared for the interest that the talk contained. Of course there are many more puzzling titles which Professot Wall could have used to inveigle listeners. He might have called his talk, for instance, "Simple Futurity v. Determination." A new and useful reflection came to me, however, as 1 heard Professor Wall recounting the story about the syntax of the Irishman, floundering in the river, who expressed his frenzied Determination to drown and not to be saved instead of mere Futurity. The Professor went on to explain that the Irish, the Scottish, and the Welsh were, apparently by time-honoured custom, considered incapable of mastering this distinction." The sanctity of such a long-standing failure would strely be ample excuse for the offender to explain with a happy smile when confronted with the Professor’s rules "Ah, manbut Ah’m Scots the noo!"