Of the old Cold War and why relations can never be ‘frost’

What you need to know:

  • What on earth are “frost relations”?

  • What the noun "relations" requires is an adjective, and "frost" is not an adjective.

  • "Frost" is just another noun.

  • What’s more, although "relations" is a plural word, both the reporter and the subeditor have used it as a singular noun.

  • This is probably why they feel obliged to use the verb form "dates", namely, the third person singular form of the infinitive "to date" in the simple present.

What are “frost relations”? I found that information in a pullout in the July 4, 2017, edition of The Standard. A story claimed: “Dar’s frost relations with Kenya dates back to (the) early 1960s.” Where “relations dates…”, there illiteracy rules supreme. And what on earth are “frost relations”?

I ask because, in that construction, what the noun relations requires is an adjective, and frost is not an adjective. Frost is just another noun. What’s more, although relations is a plural word, both the reporter and the subeditor have used it as a singular noun. This is probably why they feel obliged to use the verb form dates, namely, the third person singular form of the infinitive to date in the simple present.

What the noun relations direly requires in that situation is an adjective, and frost is just another noun, not an adjective. Frost is the solid form that water takes whenever the temperature of that liquid drops below a certain level. The noun frost has two possible adjectives: frozen and frosty. But there is a marked semantic difference between them.

BECOMES ICE

Literally, water is frozen whenever it is turned into ice, a condition that afflicts many countries of the human world, especially those situated near the poles. Such situations are, of course, also frosty. But the adjective frosty refers also to situations where the “frost” is metaphorical only namely, for example, to politically unfriendly relationships.

The relations between Moscow and the District of Columbia used to be frosty even in the most peaceable of all times. Observers on both sides of what a noted British statesman cynically called "the Iron Curtain" knew it as the Cold War "cold", that is to say, because the belligerents fought it only through a Niagara of hostile words, never resorting to the hideous “nukes” that both of them possessed.

In international relations, especially in those between Moscow and the District of Columbia once upon a time, the relations are almost permanently frosty, although I can not remember any situation in which the relations were ever truly frozen a time, namely, when the forefinger of the one president or the other was ever close to the triggering baton on the hideous nuclear mechanism in his office.

SOLID FORM

Literally, then, the verb to freeze means to turn a liquid into a solid form, as happens every year in the countries situated near the poles, forcing human beings to wear all kinds of extremely heavy clothing. In the days before the collapse of what Moscow’s Stalinists claimed to be “communism”, the temperature of the relations between Moscow and America’s District of Columbia was really and truly freezing.

But, as a metaphor, especially in the relations between the Third World and the "donor" countries, to freeze aid means to stop it altogether whenever the receiver does something which does not enhance the “donor’s” strategic world interests. The editor would have done well to use the expression to mean “frosty relations”, a good metaphor for international relations gone ice cold.

Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist.