LET'S SPEAK ENGLISH:
Broadcast: Monday, July 17 1939 at 9:00 PM

Seventh Talk of New Series - Vocabulary

I. The difference between:
a) Trip
b) Journey
c) Voyage
d) Travel
e) Excursion
f) Tour
g) Expedition.

II. Prize specimens of Pinglish:
a) Familiar instead of Family
b) Occasion instead of Bargain
c) Rentable instead of Profitable
d) Reparatures instead of Repairs
e) Prospect instead of Prospectus
f) Act instead of File
g) At the Next Time instead of Soon.

III. Words that should never be used in Palestine I
For technical reasons.

TRANSCRIPT: SEVENTH TALK - VOCABULARY

What does everyone in Palestine like to do most? What do we all do, as soon as we get a chance? Why, go abroad, of course!

I've never met a more restless population. The first verb you learn in this country is to travel. I travel, you travel, he travels, we travel, you travel, they travel. I have travelled, I shall travel, l just won't stop travelling.

So let's consider all the words that are used for moving about and see what each one means.

A TRIP is a short journey to a specified place. You can go on a pleasure trip to Tel Aviv or a business trip to Haifa; that is, whenever the buses are running.

People who go to the seaside iri England for a cheap holiday are called trippers. They try to go to the healthiest places; but it's not always easy to measure healthiness. One tripper said to an old fisherman, "I suppose the death-rate here must be very low". "Oh, no Sir ! " he replied. "Just the same as everywhere else : one per person".

Now a JOURNEY is longer than a trip and not necessarily to a specific place. You can go on a journey through Europe or through Africa. Once I went on a journey through France and borrowed my grandfather's phrase book. It dated from the time when people still travelled in coaches with two or three pairs of horses. The left hand horse of each pair carried a postillion who's a kind of driver. One of the French phrases I found in the book was 'Heavens! Our postillion has been struck by lightning'. Such a useful phrase on a journey!

If you take a journey by sea, it's called a VOYAGE. You can go for a voyage round the world. But a sea voyage is only pleasant if you don't feel sea-sick. I once asked a man on a boat on a stormy day if he'd had breakfast. All he said was, "On the contrary".

If you go for a very long journey, through several foreign countries, you TRAVEL. There's nothing like foreign travel for narrowing the mind. Do you know that famous English book called 'Gulliver's, Travels' ? It was written by Jonathan Swift two hundred years ago as a satire on the follies of his time. In this book Gulliver travelled to Lilliput which was a country inhabited by Lilliputians only six inches high.

I wish Gulliver had also travelled to Pingland, where the Pings live who speak Pinglish. Do you know what pet animals Pings have instead of dogs? Why, Pinguins. And what is their national game? Ping-pong, of course. While their favourite colour is obviously Pink.

When a Ping travels, he never says he leaves for London : he always says he leaves to London. And he always arrives to London also, instead of arriving in London. I've given up trying to correct him: it's hopeless.

If you go on a pleasure trip with a number of other people, it's called an EXCURSION. Sometimes you get railway tickets at a reduced rate on a special excursion train. I once went on an excursion from Jerusalem by motor-car to the Lebanon. I hadn't got further than a few kilometres along the road from Jerusalem to Jaffa when I came across an accident. A motor bus had hit a stone-crushing machine near the Arab village of Saris. As I left my car to help the people out of the motor bus that had crashed, I saw a notice on the stone crusher. It read 'Saris Syndicate for Crashes'. It was a little too appropriate for my liking.

Now, if you go on a journey from place to place it's called a TOUR. A hundred years ago young Englishmen of good family went on the Grand Tour. That means that they visited France, Germany and Italy to improve their education. Nowadays people who visit different places for pleasure are called tourists. Many tourists visit Palestine. They come on tourist ships; they wear tourist clothes and they visit tourist shops. They see the whole of Palestine, ancient and modern, in a day and a half.

One day I had to take a distinguished tourist to Bethlehem to see the Church of Nativity built over the spot where Christ was born just 1939 years ago. As we came out, the tourist asked me, "Did you say this church was built B. C. or A. D.?"

The last of our words relating to travel is an EXPEDITION, which is a journey for a specific object. During the last war, a British army was sent to Egypt. It was called the Egyptian Expenditionary Force and eventually drove the Turkish army out of Palestine.

Sometimes you read about archaeological expeditions. They're sent abroad to bring back good examples of earlier civilizations to put in museums. I go off occasionally to bring back good examples of the Pinglish civilization to put in my own private museum. I've discovered an important fact about the Pinglish civilization. The Pings hated women! They thought women were as bad as disease. Do you know how I found that out? Well, last week I dug up a notice board that read 'Dr. So-and-So: Women, and other diseases'. Anyone who wanted to refer to women's diseases, would have said 'Women's (with an apostrophe before the 's'), not 'Women and other diseases.'

Would you like to hear some of the other prize specimens of Pinglish in my collection? First of all there's the letter from the clerk who wanted a day's leave to settle some FAMILY affairs. But he wrote that he wanted to go off to attend to FAMILIAR business. 'Familiar' and 'family' come from the same Latin root, but you can't use 'familiar' nowadays as the adjective of 'family'. 'Familiar' means well-known. If you listen to my broadcasts each week, my voice is familiar to you. Occasionally, 'familiar' means 'too free'. When I go out for a walk with Lotte Backfisch and try to put my arm round her waist, she ought to protest and say 'Don't be. so familiar'. Luckily she doesn't know enough English.

Then there's our old Pinglish friend OCCASION. You often see it written up in the shops as 'Big Occcasion'. What they mean is a 'bargain sale'. But they take the French word occasion meaning 'opportunity' and translate it into English as 'occasion'. Do you know what a bargain is in Palestine ? It's something the shop-keeper can't sell at 50 mils. So he puts a big red ticket on it with 100 mils crossed out and sells the thing at 75 mils, as a bargain.

Number 23 in my Pinglish collection is RENTABLE. 'Rentable' is used by Palestinian economists in place of PROFITABLE. You often hear it in Hebrew as rentabili. If it costs you three piasters to grow a cabbage in a Jewish village and you can only sell it for one piastre, growing cabbages is not rentabili. But you can't translate rentabili into 'rentable'. 'Rentable' only means a house that you are able to rent. You can't rent cabbages, except, of course, to worms and beetles who apparently like living in them. The correct translation of rentabili in Hebrew is 'profitable' in English. By the way I'm told you can only find the Hebrew word in the Bible in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel - the Major Prophets.

REPARATURES is another Pinglish word. It came here from Germany without a passport and hasn't succeeded yet in getting naturalized. You see it on advertisements : - 'Reparatures of Bicycles'. In Germany it was known as Reparatur: but in English you say REPAIRS.

So when something. goes Kaput, you should take it to be repaired. A hospital is where people go to have broken legs repaired. The Kupat Halim - the Workers Sick Fund - does a lot of such repairs in its hospitals. But it isn't correct to do what I heard a German immigrant do the other day. He called the Fund Kaput Holim.

When a new business is opened in Palestine, the manager sends out to his clients what he's pleased to call in Pinglish a PROSPECT. That word also comes from the German word Prospekt; but in English you call it a PROSPECTUS. A prospect in English means an outlook, which is a very different thing. I can say that there's a prospect of peace and quiet in Palestine. It's correct English, but it isn't true. I can also say that there's a pleasant prospect from this studio across the Old City of Jerusalem - if I dared to open the window to look out. But a written description of a new enterprise is a prospectus. What with one thing and another - or rather one bomb and another, we don't get many new enterprises and prospectuses in Palestine nowadays; which is a pity.

All we get are plans and schemes and proposals which are carefully put away in FILES. The Ping, however, calls a file an ACT (A-C-T). He does this largely because in Germany a document is called an Akte. But in English an act is not a file. An act may be a law, like an act of Parliament, Or it may be a portion of a play, such as Act Three of Hamlet. A paper or cardboard jacket for preserving documents is called a file.

As a Government official, I know a lot about files. Government officials live on files : they won't eat anything else. Even as babies all they'll eat are files mashed up with a little milk and sugar. Take an official away from his files and he starves. The outside world is of no importance: what matters is what's in the file. If the file says you died in 1933, you're officially dead. Even if you turn up with your birth certificate, your passport, your identity card and a dozen witnesses, it won't help you. The file says you're dead : and dead you are. Don't laugh! I've actually seen a letter from a Government department in Palestine addressed to a man telling him he didn't exist.

The last example of Pinglish I shall give you is 'at the next time'. This also has a German origin: in der nachsten Zeit. Butin der nachsten Zea can't be translated into English as 'at the next time'. What you mean is 'in the near future'. Personally, I prefer an even shorter translation, and that is soon.

I shall soon stop talking this evening. You will soon go to bed. We shall soon all be fast asleep. Then all our troubles will be fcirgotten. So don't say 'at the next time' : it puts my teeth on edge and keeps me awake all night.

I'm a sweet-tempered person - generally. But I get very indignant when people make mistakes. And I'm positively violent when someone makes a mistake and won't admit it. That's why I hate the well-worn Palestinian phrase 'for technical reasons'. If a new newspaper fails to appear on the date for which it was announced the publisher blandly states that the delay is due to technical reasons. What he means is that he started much too late to get the material together: that several of his contributors were too lazy to write the articles they had promised : and that the printer was busy on another job. But all he says is that the delay was due to technical reasons.

If a charity concert is to be held on a Monday but is postponed for technical reasons, you can be sure that the members of the committee have quarrelled about the arrangements. But will the public be told what is the real cause of the delay? Heavens no! It's all carefully hidden behind the cowardly words 'for technical reasons'.

We don't need 'technical reasons' in Palestine. So lock the phrase up! Hit it on the head! Drown it! Do whatever you like with it, but never let me hear of it again.

Then I shall be able to sleep soundly once more. So good night to you ; and sweet dreams.