There is now a service of Three Hours at Lustleigh on Good Friday. I inquired what authority there was for this, and was informed (officially) that it was a service licensed by the Bishop under the Shortened Services Act. That was quite good as a bit of cynicism or a joke, but rather past a joke if one remembers how that Act was passed through Parliament. Its promoters said that it was only to be used for shortening the old services, not for introducing anything new.
On the coronation of Queen Victoria there was a service in Exeter Cathedral and ‘rejoicings’ in the town; and my father’s diary finds fault--“the stupid dun of cannon, which even fired during the anthem, shaking the edifice and distracting everyone’s attention”--and so on for a couple of pages, finishing, “it seemed somewhat like a Good Friday: by no means a favourite day of mine.”
There is no desire here for more Good Fridays or Ash Wednesdays, but only for Shrove Tuesdays at all seasons of the year; and these Carnivals are not followed by Lenten fasts. Carnivals are superseding Fêtes and Galas, here called Feets and Gaylers; but knowing that a Swarry (or a Soirée) consisted of a leg of mutton, I should say that every Carnival or Feet or Gayler consists of a brass band ‘with the usual trimmings’ like the leg. It seems perverse of people to speak of fêtes as feets when they invariably speak of beans as banes, and even more perverse to want these foreign words at all. This coast is getting known as a Riviera, which they pronounce Riveerer as if it were a German word.
I have got a bill here for ‘mendin gardin oz’--hose--and I have seen a bill in Bedfordshire for ‘hoke’ and ‘hellum’ and ‘hash.’ With phonetic spelling there would be as many written languages as there are dialects now--water would be ‘warter’ in the Eastern counties, and ‘watter’ or ‘wetter’ here--but fonetic fanatics would take the cockney dialect and foist it on us all. On looking at an Elementary English Grammar, of which 350,000 have been sold, I found it said--“Take c out of the alphabet, and we could write, kat, sity, speshal, instead of cat, city, special, and in thus writing those words, we should be writing them according to their pronunciation.” No doubt, the cockney news-boys screech out ‘Extra Speshal’; but if we are to get pronunciation down from town, we might get it from the West End rather than the East.