ENGLISH USAGE
Sir,-I was astonished on reading your footnote to the letter from "Student" in the issue of December 2- astonished to learn that the over-rated Mr. Fowler should so dynamite his own lifework. The result is to uphold the speech and pronunciation of the playing ground and the picture palace against the classroom; its effects will reach to the end of time, words will be further and further divorced from their basic meaning and the richest language in the world will become a jargon. Such a decline is in keeping with modern art, in which the realist portrays physical matter as he sees it, or says he sees it-or because he has not the ability to do it any better or more ‘truly. i I do not uphold "Student’s" first paragraph, since we normally refer to the temperature as "warm" and "cool," but I do see that confusion may arise in the mind of the listener if emphasis through pronunciation does not separate noun from adjective, as in the cases he cites, although Kol’ég is given for both noun and intransitive verb in some diction-
aries.
B. S.
BARNETT
(Napier )
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 550, 6 January 1950, Page 5
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191ENGLISH USAGE New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 550, 6 January 1950, Page 5
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