OFTEN, ORPHAN, AND AWFN.

Sir Henry commented on defects of pronunciation, giving as an example “often,” which he said, was corrupted to “orphan” and “awfn.” As with the consonants, so with the vowels, and by sheer slackness and carelessness of utterance we were reducing all the vowels to that sound which the inexpert speaker usually made “er, er, er.” (Laughter.) We should not articulate sounds presently unless the educational bodies made headway against the process which was going on. (Hear, hear.) Formerly rightly considered anathema, the split infinitive was publicly defended the other day in one of our leading journals. The use of “like” instead of “as,” a terrible vulgarism, was coming into popular use.

Then there was that kind of commercial English in which boys were encouraged to use, instead of prohibited from using, phrases such as “Your esteemed favour to hand, and in reply to same we beg to state.” (Laughter.) There was also the idea that any part of speech might be used for another. Any substantive in the world might be used as an adjective nowadays.

In a newspaper the other day he came across three headlines: “Election Returns,” “Reparations Expert,” and “Empire Preference.” The first words of these headlines were substantives and not adjectives. Recently a public entertainer announced that he was going to feature vaudeville. “Vaudeville” was bad enough, but “feature vaudeville” was worse. “You may say that such an instance is at the bottom of the ladder,” said Sir Henry, “and you do not say that you ‘feature classics’ in your syllabus, but unless you are very careful your successors will, for the evil is overspreading us to-day. (Laughter.)

“Then there is the use of words,” he continued. “In some cases we have taken the whole meaning out of words and have made catchwords of them. I do not mean the actual catchwords which change as the pantomimes change, though I think the social historian of a hundred years hence who gets hold of our annual catchwords will have grave misgivings about our intellect. (Laughter.) During the last six months of the war London was entirely occupied by one jest. You heard it at the church door, in the Tube, ’bus, and restaurant. It was every time greeted with the same ripple of laughter. It consisted entirely of saying ‘Good-bye-ee’ instead of ‘Good-bye.’ (Laughter.) It was neither

better nor worse than the catchwords which preceded or followed it, but it is not a high testimony to our intellectual discrimination. (Hear, hear.)

‘The gentle art’ to-day has no meaning. ‘Conspicuous by his absence’ is used simply as a synonym for ‘absent’; letting a person ‘severely alone’ meant something once, but now it means nothing. We are in danger of having all the meaning drained out of our picturesque words and phrases. Nowadays there are two uses of the phrase ‘of course’ – both of them unjustified.

When it is said, ‘Mr. X.Y. is, of course, the author of love lyrics of the Japanese’ it simply means ‘Of course, I do not expect you know it, but you will be offended if I say so.’ Then when someone says, ‘My aunt lives at Bath, but, of course, she does not like turnips,’ the term is merely a mark of shyness, while in the other case it is a semi-apology for intellectual arrogance.” (Laughter.)

The other day, Sir Henry proceeded, he passed a place of entertainment called the Palladium, yet the Palladium really meant a small wooden image of Athena, which fell down from heaven in Troy and was worshipped by the Ephesians. Again, he read in a book recently the phrase “meticulous accuracy of the machine.” The man who wrote it had got it into his head that meticulous meant something to do with exact measure. It had no more to do with that than with a meat safe. Meticulous meant timorous. What was the machine afraid of? (Laughter.) Again, there was the word “exclusive.” He read of a firm advertising its “exclusive matrons’ tea gowns.” He was not sure which was exclusive, the matrons or the tea gowns. (Laughter.)