No, the word ‘cheater’ does not really exist
An English teacher looks over assignments of her Standard Three pupils at Kawangware Primary School on October 5, 2015. By means of profound silence on it, Collins affirms that the word “cheater” does not exist in the English language. PHOTO | GERALD ANDERSON | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- By means of profound silence on it, Collins affirms that the word “cheater” does not exist in the English language.
- This particular “down-table” operative — as we used to describe everybody working under the chief sub-editor — does not say.
Clearly, many members of Kenya’s Press corps do not learn.
If they did, the word “cheaters”, for example, would no longer appear on the pages of our newspapers because some of us have condemned that word umpteen times.
Yet the word was prominent in the January 18 number of The Standard.
It appeared first in a page-one pointer – “Cheaters’ crazy antics when busted” — and, secondly, as part of a huge turn-headline on page one of the magazine.
Accordingly, then, what is a cheater? In this particular context, I gathered that a “cheater” is a married person who has one or more sex flings on the side.
Yet “cheaters” of that kind abound in every sphere of life other than sex.
They include the preacher who promises “God’s heaven on earth” on the very morrow; the politician who pledges the man in the moon for every one of his or her constituents; and the partisan newspaper commentator who assures his readers that the ruling party is “the be-all and the end-all here” (in Shakespeare’s parlance).
However, a cheat — not a cheater — was probably the word that the reporter and his/her sub-editor had in mind.
For, indeed, my dictionary says that a person who cheats is simply a cheat.
By means of profound silence on it, Collins affirms that the word “cheater” does not exist in the English language.
That is English for you. Logic is by no means its claim to greatness.
For, if logic were the crux of the matter, then — just as a person who eats is an eater — so a person who cheats would be a cheater.
FREE MARKET
But I want to affirm here that, though I am a dedicated word-hunter, I have never yet speared such quarry as a “cheater”.
Contrariwise, as Tweedledee used to tell Tweedledum — or was it the other way round? — a cheetah was what I once came face to face with among the trees that line the River Kwoyo next door to my native village of Manyatta.
I still shudder at the thought that it might have been a leopard — a lookalike much more ferocious.
According to the sub-editor involved, then, what is a “cheater”?
This particular “down-table” operative — as we used to describe everybody working under the chief sub-editor — does not say.
So we have to make our own effort. It is that to cheat is to act or speak dishonestly, with the aim of gaining some personal profit or leeway or some other advantage.
No I do not write with the intention condemning mendacity in economic marketeering and ecclesiastical advertising.
For I have it on the authority of every theistic priest ever since Martin Luther, that a “free market” was what the god Jehovah and his only begotten son Jesus ordained for mankind.
Who does not, simultaneously, know that, for the Protestant evangelist, if cheating were banned on pain of death, heaven would move much farther away into space and, here on earth, life would just come to a screeching halt.
