'Cheap' refers not only to prices but also to quality
Fuel prices at a petrol station in Eldoret on November 15, 2016. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
“Cheap”, then, refers not only to prices but also – more importantly – to the quality of production and, therefore, also to how well a product maintains your physical and mental health.
I say so because – in my own profession alone, I know highly intelligent Kenyans who can no longer write even their names properly.
Their brains have long ago gone haywire and their hands are permanently on the shake. I myself escaped such a fate only after a nearly fatal event occurred to me in my bedroom after long hours of swilling with my German friend in Berlin sometime in the early 1970s.
The adjective cheaper is meaningful only in a comparative situation. Consider, then, a page two statement in the January 30 edition of the Nation, which promised “Cheaper fuel in a ball”. For a linguistically educated reader, the question was immediate: “Cheaper than what?”
Thus – to reiterate – the adjective cheaper makes sense only in comparison – namely, only in the presence of comparable goods. The problem here, then, was that there was nothing at all even in the text to be compared to or compared with the named item.
Please note the difference between those two expressions. To compare to is to liken two or more things or ideas, whereas to compare with is to contrast them. Kenya’s wealth compares to Uganda’s, whereas it compares with Britain’s.
However, be careful with the adjective cheap and its comparative and superlative forms (cheaper and cheapest). Clearly, the shopkeeper who keeps announcing that his goods are “cheap” is not going to attract any upmarket buyer.
But why not? Because the adjective cheap is not confined to prices. A shopkeeper who speaks like that is apparently unaware that the adjective cheap can refer also both to the material of which the item is made and to the quality of workmanship that has gone into the product.
Even in politics – especially in Kenya – any schoolchild can tell you who is and who is not a cheap politician. Perhaps he or she is in somebody else’s pockets, a vile practice which Kenyans allowed to reach its zenith of ugliness during an era called Nyayo.
THIRD LEVEL
More often than not, indeed, only "tertiarily" – only in the third place – does the adjective cheap refer to prices. For those “with it”, cheap refers primarily to the quality of the material and secondarily to the quality of workmanship (to cloth manufacture and to the tailoring).
Only "tertiarily" (at the third level) does the price “on offer” enter the equation. For instance, whenever you assert that beer is cheaper than whisky, you must be sure you know exactly who the respective makers of each particular brand are.
The quality of certain beers is a hundred times greater than the quality of certain Nairobi products that go under the name “brandy” and “whisky”. But I said permanent goodbye to alcohol (and tobacco) decades ago and, certainly, I am no longer in a position to advise you objectively on which makes to prefer.
“Cheap”, then, refers not only to prices but also – more importantly – to the quality of production and, therefore, also to how well a product maintains your physical and mental health. I say so because – in my own profession alone, I know highly intelligent Kenyans who can no longer write even their names properly.
Their brains have long ago gone haywire and their hands are permanently on the shake. I myself escaped such a fate only after a nearly fatal event occurred to me in my bedroom after long hours of swilling with my German friend in Berlin sometime in the early 1970s.
