“Try Fluke.”

The hybridising of the Maori tongue proceeds apace. There are ever so many new and fascinating pakeha words to be adopted into the language. “Tutepe” and “Whakitarata” (for two-step and foxtrot) are thoroughly established in the kainga. But for one of the old-timers in Maorified English I have a special fancy; it made a convenient pen-name long ago. The other night Mr. W. W. Bird, the retired Chief Inspector of Native Schools (his Maori name is “Te Manu-rere,” “The Flying Bird”), in one of his excellent radio talks on the native tongue, mentioned the deft manner in which the slang or near-slang “try fluke” is inflected. He heard a Maori, after a lucky stroke at billiards, exclaim, “Kua tarai-wherukutia ahau” (“I try-fluked it”). Quite a linguistic gem that!

“Try Fluke” goes back a long way. There have been Maori racehorses and pakeha gold-mines so named. I think it must have been introduced to the land with the first billiard table. But its applications are many and various. I heard of a bright young fellow from the (say) Ngati-noho-noa-iho tribe who announced jauntily to his admiring fellow lads of the kainga after he was acquitted—to his own amazement—on a charge of horse stealing: “Ha! Tarai-wheruku all right that time! I walk away easy!”