CONTEMPORARY SPEECH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 534, 16 September 1949, Page 5

CONTEMPORARY SPEECH

Sir,-All language is mutable. Words come on-stage; enjoy, in some cases, brief periods of acceptance and then pass offstage into oblivion. During their periods of acceptance, some words are used in every possible connection-and "$6metimes, philologically, improperly. About 40 years ago, a very hardworked and ill-used word was "inimical." Poor thing, it was trotted out on every possible occasion and was often made to serve purposes quite outside its root meaning. Though the word has not sunk into desuetude it is used far less frequently nowadays. "Nostalgia" is a word that seems to be enjoying a high popularity these days. I

notice it often in The Listener, In a recent criticism of some Swiss music that had, I suppose, come over the air, the critic wrote that the music was warm, nostalgic and clinging. I assurne that the critic is‘a New Zealander or, at least, not a Swiss. I had some fair idea of the true meaning of the word. I thought that it‘meant the yearning of an exile for the land of his birth. So I went to Dr. Chambers to see whether the use of the word in the criticism could be justified. I could find no such justification. It is beyond me to imagine what the critic meant. Notice may also be taken of the overuse of the word "stem," when branch only is intended. And it is unusual, yet, to use the word as a verb; but that ‘use seems to be creeping in. I suppose that it has a high-brow look about it. If within a movement, a subsidiary movement take shape, then the latter is said to "stem" off from the former. I do not see why the more correct and homely "branch" ‘could not be used. I write only to urge that plain and homely English is a" very satisfying vehicle for the expression of thought, and that writing in such a paper as The Listener might well be characterised by well-known and well-understood lansu-

age.

L. A.

TAYLOR

(Hawera).