Editors, please get over this word ‘over’ in headlines
Newspapers at a newsstand outside Sarova Stanley hotel along Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
If you keep repeating it, every word in the vocabulary of England—preposition and otherwise—will frustrate the appetites of the consumers of all your journalistic dishes.
As Mark Twain points out in one of his laugh-a-minute skits, in the German language, repetition of that kind is a mark of good writing.
- But, in English, it isn’t
Biologists define intelligence, both individual and specific, as quickness to learn. But, in that case, how intelligent are you when—as a reporter or a sub-editor of your country’s most popular newspaper—you keep repeating a language mistake to which your attention has been drawn a myriad of times?
Though, in this column, I have criticised the preposition over more times than anything else, how many reporters of this very newspaper group keep misusing the word over? How many times does the misuse pass the sub-editors’ and the editorial copy reviser’s muster? Here are a few examples that caught my eyes in the Nation’s July 18 number:
Battle lines drawn over talks in IEBC (page 6),
Senator wants sub-division of Mwea land stopped over row (18),
Ward reps hit back at Machage over ODM threat (21),
Man’s burial stopped over land dispute (22),
Alarm raised over teenage gangs terrorising residents (22),
Unions to meet county officers over head count (22),
Youth burn tuktuk over murder (23),
Aspirant locked out over papers gets degree (23),
Mututho now blames Mbugua over corruption (23),
Minister: 6,000 held over Turkey coup plot (25) and
Man, woman arrested over attack in France (26).
APPALLED ME
How many examples of such language folly did The Star and The Standard—The Nation’s daily competitors in the business of mutilating the English language—commit on that day? The mere idea of checking appalled me. So I returned, instead, to the book I had been reading on the history of world languages.
But my word to East Africa’s reporters and sub-editors—especially Kenya’s—remains: Please get over this word “over” (especially in headlines) because it is among the examples of the folly that continues to lower Kenya’s image in the eyes of the world’s language epicures—namely, those who will not consume anything but excellent intellectual food.
This I will say again and again: Mental food is like biological food in every way. It must be taken both choosily and in suitably small doses. Or else it might occasion serious constipation. It is for that reason that I never tire of warning Kenya’s newspaper scribes against their daily rush for and misuse or over-use of “over”.
That preposition will disgust the palate of every epicure among the world’s consumers of journalistic dishes. Yet—as I have said here approximately a million times before—the word over has umpteen synonyms. Try, for example, on or upon to see if this will not effectively bung the hole for you. Try also above and atop, the latter preposition meaning simply “on top of”.
Indeed, if you keep repeating it, every word in the vocabulary of England—preposition and otherwise—will frustrate the appetites of the consumers of all your journalistic dishes. As Mark Twain points out in one of his laugh-a-minute skits, in the German language, repetition of that kind is a mark of good writing.
But, in English, it isn’t. That’s why our journalists’ daily repetition of the word over is so disgusting.
