Precocious as Kenya is, it is not precautious
What you need to know:
- The germ of knowledge once planted on both sides of the Mediterranean is what has brought mankind to its present technical ability to storm even Jehovah’s heaven.
What was “the original germ of corruption” by which — like Jewry’s “Original Sin” of Adam and Eve — one newspaper commentator recently explained independent Kenya’s precocious moral decomposition”?
I call it precocious because it has developed by leaps and bounds to mature too early.
My dictionary describes the adjective precocious as “…having developed or matured too early or too soon…”
No, though the pronunciations of precocious and precautious are practically identical, please take care not to confuse the two adjectives.
The first (precocious) comes from the Latin pre (“before”) and coquere (to ripen).
In other words, many living entities in nature and history — including nation-states — may, in some way, reach maturity only a few decades after birth.
That should be food for thought for a society like Kenya, which, a whole 50 years since independence, is still behaving as helplessly as a toddler.
Contrariwise — as Tweedledum used to Tweedledee — a human child might begin showing signs of adulthood long even before teenage.
In that connection, whenever a child shows an interest in the opposite sex long before teenage, you may describe him or her as sexually precocious — namely, that he or she has matured before time.
But, noticing it in the child, the parents are sure to rush in with a Niagara of precautions, advising the child to be extremely cautious about it — namely, to take care not to allow it to plunge the child into any activity, such as unplanned and, therefore, unwanted pregnancy, that might harm his or her objective interests in life.
In short, the adjective precocious means taking place or maturing or having developed earlier than is normal for a person or animal of a given age.
For its part, however, the adjective precautious means careful or taking care not to do anything that might, as a consequence, jeopardise any of your objective interests in life.
An example is that, from its colonial birth, a mere decades ago, our national corruption has ripened by leaps and bounds to make Sodom and Gomorrah look like the celestial abode of Jewry’s own Jehovah and of Europe’s own Christ — Sodom and Gomorrah being, according to those faiths, the place where, after Eden, the germ of all human iniquities were next planted.
Collins describes a germ as a tiny living thing, especially one that causes disease.
So we speak, for instance, of malaria germs and leprosy germs.
But, from that basically negative definition, the word germ has acquired also certain very positive meanings.
Nowadays a germ may also be anything that serves as the nucleus or root of a good thing.
Although Hawkingian science is a giant’s “leap-forward” from Newtonian physics, Stephen Hawking himself is unthinkable without Isaac Newton — who is, in turn, unthinkable without the activities on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea of certain brilliant ancient Egyptian and Greek speculators into nature.
The germ of knowledge once planted on both sides of the Mediterranean is what has brought mankind to its present technical ability to storm even Jehovah’s heaven.
