Editors should join me in this language war
What you need to know:
- In my 50 years as a newspaper reporter, sub-editor, copy reviser and manager throughout East Africa, I remember no English word the headline writers have overworked more than the preposition over.
- Of the many possible answers to the question of misuse of words is the one about which I would like to appeal to the chief editors and managing directors of those newspapers to join me in the struggle for propriety.
- As with Mark Twain — in his laugh-a-minute skit The Awful German Language — I readily agree that to try to grasp one English preposition is like trying to catch a conger eel.
I was alarmed when a Kenyan to whom I had just been introduced, said, referring to my work, that he depended a great deal on our daily newspapers for his education on the English language.
To be sure, if the print media made it their task, they would help a great deal to rescue all of us from the abyss of language into which we are all sinking daily.
Take the word “over”. If it did not exist in English, all the sub-editors of Kenya’s English-language media would have conspired to invent it. “Sub-editor” is the newspaper term for a person employed to check and edit written material to ensure its factuality as well as its propriety in terms of political, cultural and aesthetical sensitivities and in terms of grammar.
For the question is stark and staring: How else would Kenya’s English-language print media proceed if the preposition over did not exist? What would the sub-editors do if the preposition “over” were banned on pain of death? I ask because, despite my frequent advice against that word, all our dailies insist on it in their headlines — to the point of disgust.
In my 50 years as a newspaper reporter, sub-editor, copy reviser and manager throughout East Africa, I remember no English word the headline writers have overworked more than the preposition over.
When a term is overworked, we call it a cliché, namely, a word or group of words so overused that it has lost all meaning and is no longer effective.
Take the following headlines, both on page 6 of the current number of The Standard on Sunday: “WHO, ministry, allay fears over polio vaccine” and “Governors now lock horns with EACC over funds uptake study”. Whatever a “funds uptake study” may be, what does it mean to “lock horns over” it?
Why won’t The Nation, The Star and The Standard — especially the last one — give that word a long-lasting rest?
Of the many possible answers to the question of misuse of words is the one about which I would like to appeal to the chief editors and managing directors of those newspapers to join me in the struggle for propriety.
News, they purport, is their stock-in-trade. I add merely that the merchandise would go like hot cakes if it were wrapped up in linguistic garb that is not only racy but also correct, not only in terms of grammar but also in terms of idiomatic colour and currency.
That is why I say that it is in their own interest for the managers of these newspapers to help me in this language war.
As with Mark Twain — in his laugh-a-minute skit The Awful German Language — I readily agree that to try to grasp one English preposition is like trying to catch a conger eel.
But the point is that you freely chose that European language as your medium of tuition, governance and commerce. That is why you have no choice but to tame every prepositional idiom in English.
