Little-known rule of figures of speech that many of us always get wrong

A teacher takes her pupils through an English lesson at Gita Camp Nursery in Kisumu County on March 26, 2013. People should be taught that the term remains “head of cattle” (singular) even if the herd be composed of a million animals. PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • In general, a figure of speech is an expression composed of words so juxtaposed as to mean something quite other than the literal meanings of those words separately.
  • Let us stress it. In the phrase “head of state”, head is what you can pluralise, not state. But in the phrase “head of cattle”, you can pluralise, not head, but only cattle.

Figures of speech are the salt and pepper of language, every language.

In general, a figure of speech is an expression composed of words so juxtaposed as to mean something quite other than the literal meanings of those words separately.

Synecdoche is one frequent figure of speech which none of Kenya’s users of English ever seems to have heard of.

In a synecdoche, either the whole is substituted for a part or a part is substituted for the whole.

“Head of cattle” is a common example in East Africa. What it seems to mean is that cattle are to be counted only by the heads. Yet it is just as easy — the non-herder might retort — to count cattle by the mouths or the tails.

But no Nilote — none of Kenya’s Kalenjin, Luo, Maasai and Samburu — will ever entertain such a thought.

Indeed, in a society as dedicated to livestock as England remains, that was the probable origin of the English term headcount, which remains common whenever, in a former English colony like Kenya, the day arrives for the census.

To jog your memory, a national census — which comes after every 10 years or so — is a count (head by head) of the human beings who compose both what we nowadays call a nation-state and such of its component parts as age-groups, confessions, counties, ethnicities, genders, locations, provinces and races.

But, given the enduring practice of nocturnal inter-ethnic livestock theft — of which the sprawling Maasai remain the community most dreaded by neighbouring ethnic groups — ethnic cattle belongings often were the subject of a periodic headcount long even before the colonial European regime imposed the census on East Africa’s human beings.

Since every human being has only one head, the exercise was also called a headcount.

This was useful to the colonial regime because it enabled it, among other things, to calculate in advance the amount of financial income that might be accruing to its coffers by means of imposing a poll tax on practically all of the colony’s male adults.

Here the word poll literally meant (and still means) the same thing as the word head.

A poll remains the casting, recording and counting of votes in an election or a referendum or the result of such an exercise, where, literally, the word poll refers to the head of each participant. Hence the term “headcount”.

But be careful. For, although, in the expression “head of state”, the word “head” can be pluralised — although many heads of state can visit Kenya on a single occasion — in the expression “head of cattle” the word head cannot be pluralised.

The term remains “head of cattle” (singular) even if the herd be composed of a million animals.

Let us stress it. In the phrase “head of state”, head is what you can pluralise, not state. But in the phrase “head of cattle”, you can pluralise, not head, but only cattle.