What’s common to Kenyans might baffle foreigners

Only if its meaning is immediate can a newspaper headline most powerfully draw the potential reader to the story under it. Yet take this headline on page 9 of the Nation of October 5: “Why MCAs rejected cheaper birth control”. It confronted you with at least one question:  What on earth is an “MCA”?

If information is your stock-in-trade, how would that headline have impelled anybody to rush to the pocket to retrieve money with which to buy a copy of your newspaper?

I put this question on behalf of the hundreds of readers, including our ubiquitous “tourists” from Western Europe, North America and Japan, including even those from certain neighbouring countries, arriving in Kenya for the first time.

Thirsting for fresh facts and figures on Kenya, the visitors dash for copies of your newspaper as a potential supplier of objective information, only to be profoundly perplexed by a myriad of terms and phrases which, although widely understandable locally, would have made absolutely no sense especially to any newly arrived American, Asian, Australasian and European.

PROMOS

Yet, as our newspapers boldly assert in their promos, “information” is their very stock-in-trade. But, in that case, what information did the term “MCA” immediately impart to the Chinese or Dane or even Tanzanian or Ethiopian who was arriving in your country for the first time that morning? 

Indeed, even among your own Kenyan readers, how many would immediately have understood your term “MCA” in a headline?

In short, unless an organisation is very well known by the abbreviated form of its name, do not use an abbreviation.  Such abbreviations as UN, UNESCO, UNICEF and USA are so well known all over the world that they cause no problem whatsoever even in a headline. While it ruled, even “Kanu” always stood effectively in a headline for the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the political instrument with which certain individuals coerced our country for decades.

CHEAPER GOODS

Moreover, the writer of the headline with which we began our story today had assumed that “cheaper” goods are what Kenya’s consumer community really needs.  Yet any slight thought about it should reveal that qualitatively more expensive goods are what Kenyans are objectively yearning for in their lives.

What Kenyans objectively gasp for are “cost-effective” or “price-efficient” commodities. If such are what you have in mind, then please say so because the adjective cheap and its comparative and superlative forms cheaper and cheapest invoke other,  very negative, ideas which have little to do with costs and prices.

I used to wonder greatly at the taste of a member of President Daniel arap Moi’s power group who always wore suits of clothing which — I was told — had been extremely  expensively  paid for but which, nevertheless,  always managed to look extremely cheap both in material and in cut.

Concerning clothes, then, cheap always invokes poor quality of material and poor cut and tailoring. That is why you must be careful in your use of the adjectives cheap and expensive, especially concerning bodily appointment. 

 Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]