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SOON DEAD FLAPPER WORDS SPEECH CLEANSES ITSELFThe speech of the plain people is characteristically candid, and its candour is strengthened by colloquial isms j but the speech itself does not necessarily become vulgar thereby although, when the mind is roused, words may be plentiful and then it ia not particular in its choice of them, writes Frank Vizetelly, in the New York f Times.’ The speech fostered by “ flapperoc-racy ” led a carefree life. It welcomed any1 word—“ dimbox/’ 4C shifter,”“ snuggle-pup/’ or what not—that came its way, but when tired of it dropped it. Ten years from now thocant of flapperocraey will be as dead asthe dodo; “ apple sauce” will once more be the pleasant concoction of apples served at the table, and few of our children will remember what aJi butter-and-ogg-nian ” was. The English language is a pretty good language still. It keeps itself clean automatically^We owe a good many of the novelties in ivord-eoinage to the plain people; hut, in greater number, terms of a different type hove been coined by scholars and specialists in the arts and sciences, created by inventors, or introduced by journalists and travellers. Enriched by the efforts of these people as the language has been, it was made richer by disputations from which the word “ educate ,T was itself not free.Three hundred years after its introduction, the word u educational/’ when used as a part of tlie title of a periodical, aroused protest and was derided as unscholarly. It caused the learned Archbishop of Dublin, himself master in the use of words, to term it (i an offensive novelty/’ and the editor of ‘ The Literary Churchman ’ to deprecate the use to which it had been put. Before the words (i conscious ” and “ strenuous ” were finally adopted theywere held up to derision, but they won their way into the language.NOT KINDLY.Public opinion is not always kindly disposed toward terms that win places in the dictionaries, and some of theseterms have faced captious criticism in consequence. Devery’s 11 chesty *r and Roosevelt’s “ Chinafieation ” were among these. To one not living in the United States at the time it may perhaps be permitted to hazard the belief that Cleveland's “innocuous desuetude” sent many a reader of the President’s message to a dictionary for enlightenment that unfortunately it did not supply. The lt;f experiment noble in purpose ” that we owe to President Hoover the Press was not slow to twist into “ noble experiment ” for purposes far less noble than the original, no matter what may be said to the contrary, and the apostles of demijohn rule were quick to dip their pens into the gall and aloes and give ” Wickcr-sham-ite ,J to an expectant world, “ Normalcy ” was hastily tacked on to President Harding, who merely used a word that had already been in use ill mathematical science for nearly a century, and it returned to the pages of the dictionarywith a different signification. The Rooseveltian 14 pussyfooted ” met with the approval of one section of the Press that accepted it as a fitting term to describe the state of the political party to which the section was opposed, but it was shunned by the opposition Press,“ Bother/' “ bantam/’ “ coax/1 “ rampage/’ and “ humbug ” are words about which the purists used to quarrel, but who condemns them now? If virility of language is to be preserved, we must continue to embrace the best that there is in speech. The cauldron of usage is the refining pot into which all words must go for purification. There they may bob up and down, as the mass seethes or simmers,or even boil over and out of the pot, j to become outcasts of the linguistic family. This is what has happened tothe vocabulary of flapperdom m which little was worth saving.BEAUTY NOT ENOUGH. 1But there is another side to the ean-r£vas—beautiful words arrayed neatly \T — T ■ - 4-1 1 ' 1
Newspaper Details
Clyde Dunstan Times
Clyde, South Island, NZ
Mon, Dec 14, 1931
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Sara M.
CA 12 Mar 2022
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Clyde Dunstan Times
