How one missing word could easily mislead readers

I culled the following words from page one of the Daily Nation of Thursday, July 20: “Three wives of former powerful cabinet minister Nicholas Biwott were yesterday introduced to hundreds of mourners …” Surely, as East Africa’s leading information merchant, the newspaper should strive to do better than that.

Without the definite article the, the words “three wives” could only mean that Mr Biwott had many more wives than three but that only three members of his harem “…were yesterday introduced to hundreds of mourners …” Yet such information can dismay only Europeans, North Americans and other societies which traditionally pay lip service to monogamy.

Led by the priesthood – namely, by men who try to impress God by swaggering like peacocks from their pulpits every Friday, Saturday or Sunday – our world’s men of religion pay the most glowing lip service to monogamy, sometimes even to total sexual abstinence, but go on, throughout the rest of the week, to illicitly enjoy the most profuse nocturnal sex with the wives and daughters of other men.

THE NEWS

But if the above writer meant to affirm merely that Nicholas Kipyator Biwott, the Cabinet potentate, had had three wives, then where exactly was the news? In that construction, language was what let the journalist down. If he or she was sure that Mr Biwott had had that many wives, then the writer should have used the definite article the to introduce the words “three wives”. The writer should have said: “The three wives of formerly powerful cabinet minister Nicholas Biwott were yesterday introduced to hundreds…”

Note the adverb formerly in that construction. It means the obvious: that, upon his death, the man ceased to be powerful. Moreover, without the definite article the, the statement implied that the man had had many more wives than three. Furthermore, to reiterate, the phrase meant that, being dead, Mr Biwott was no longer anywhere near power. He had arrived at that destination beyond which, as we know from both Ecclesiastes and Mark Twain, no traveller ever returns.

NO EQUAL

The media themselves may be the poorer for the minister’s departure because, among those of Kenya’s political showmen, Nicholas Kipyator Biwott’s tongue had no equal in providing page one splash headlines to all our print newsrooms. What our writer (above) should have said is: “The three widows of … Nicholas Biwott were yesterday introduced to hundreds of mourners…”

But, in the absence of the definite article (the) from the writer’s statement, anybody with a scientific grasp of the English language might, on reading those words, have assumed that Mr Biwott had possessed a harem bigger than that of Solomon, one of ancient Jewry’s sex maniacs.

Yet there would have been no wonder. For we know from Jewry’s own ornately exaggerated biblical tale that Semitic men of the time when the Bible was being wangled were as prurient as their coeval neighbours in Nilotic Egypt, namely, the ancestors of our own Acholi, Kalenjin, Luo, Maasai, Teso and other Nilotes of modern day’s North-Eastern Africa.

Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist.

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