No, an inanimate object cannot get lost; man loses it

English dictionary. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • A book can usually change its position only through this second party, namely (as a rule), a human being.

Edward Carey Francis, the celebrated Englishman who headed Kenya’s famous Alliance High when I attended it, habitually chided any boy who, when asked where his book (say) was, replied that it had “got lost”.

To say so — as an American president had once put it — was to “pass the buck”.

To “pass the buck”, then, is to commit the crime of shifting responsibility from yourself to somebody else or to some other authority.

At least one thing is self-evident. A book does not “get lost”.

HEADLINE

Having no means of self-locomotion, a book stays in one place until a second party — most likely a human being — intervenes.

A book can usually change its position only through this second party, namely (as a rule), a human being.

In short, things of that kind do not, cannot, “get lost”. No, it is you, a human being, who can lose them.

That was the problem with a headline that I culled from page 8 of ‘The Standard’ of Monday, January 23.

In a two-decked banner, it screamed: “Highways and urban streets bear brunt of impunity in Central”.

It was tantamount to accusing in court a culprit — say, a dog — who has no oral means of self-defence.

Let me reiterate this. Every time a politician talks to you about the Government having lost your tax money, please do accost him or her to explain to you how money — a lifeless and footless thing — can walk out of the Treasury’s heavily guarded cache to enter unguided into an official’s pocket or bank account.

INANIMATE
No — as a well-known British playwright used to quip — we “need no ghost to tell us” that “highways and urban streets” are not (as ‘The Standard’ alleged in a headline) what can “bear the brunt of impunity” for Kenya’s road carnage.

In the words of an American president remarkable for his language, to claim so is to “pass the buck”.

For “highways and urban streets” have no brains, hands and feet and cannot drive.

No, you cannot blame the mortal evils of a Kenyan highway on the highway itself.

Every one of such evils must be blamed squarely on a human being — on, for instance, the government’s ministry in charge of public thoroughfares and of transport safety throughout the Republic.

It is like telling a court of law the lie that your neighbour is the guilty party, not you — a lie as gargantuan as the one that Europe’s classical Italian fathers have told the world — that the Jews (as a whole) — not officials of the imperialist Euro-Italian state of Rome itself — were the ones who crucified a religio-political Jewish rebel called Jesus.

America’s version of the English language has a fitting expression for it.

To “pass the buck” — a phrase reportedly coined by America’s own Harry Truman, the highly vocal occupant of the White House during the Second World War — is to cause other people to believe that your neighbours, and not you, are the ones responsible for whatever is now being publicly condemned.