At a suburban police court on Tuesday a magistrate took strong exception to a witness's frequent use of the terms "cobber" and "half-quid."
Is youth not less pedantic, less absurd,
Less prone to value things of little worth
In failing to wax wrath about a word
That bears suspicion of a lowly birth?
All words have known their low and vulgar days --
Known grime and poverty when they were young;
And many a proud and pompous modern phrase
Was once the plaything of a common tongue.
But as we grow respectable and staid
Mere sound, to middle-age, parades as sense.
Grey slaves of precedent, we grow afraid
Of youth and all its sane inconsequence.
Forgetting words are no god-given things,
With queer intolerance we would insist --
In terms to which the mould of ages clings --
On purity that never did exist.
Language is not the gift of any god;
Rude tribesmen made it when the race was young;
And as around the weary earth we plod
Still the illiterate enrich the tongue;
And still while careless youth goes gaily rid
Of age's caution, precedent and pence,
Better a cobber who'll lend half a quid
Than all the thrifty pedant's "common sense."
First published in The Herald, 10 April 1930
Author reference sites: C.J. Dennis, Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Poetry Library
See also.
