Language has rules, don’t invent those that suit yourself

e other day, a daily newspaper carried the headline: “It was till death did them apart”.

The editors were so proud of their locution that they tried to intensify the reader’s attention to it by putting the caption’s headline in lush red.

Indeed, death would have “done apart” even lovers as intense as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

And, as the English Bard knew (in another impressive dramatic piece), when lovers reach a certain pitch, they become like mad men and are of “…imagination all compact…”

MATERIALISM

What I beg to disagree with is only the grammar that a latter-day sub-editor of the Nairobi newspaper has deployed.

That manner in which the desk head took it is simply not acceptable on the pages of a major English language newspaper in a country where English has been made a vital means of inter-personal understanding in production, education, culture, government and other vital -human activities all over the country.

IDIOM

Death does, indeed, cause pain by separating loving human pairs.

But the English idiom with which I am familiar is not “death does them apart” On the contrary, the correct verbal expression means that “death causes them to go their own separate ways for ever”.

Of course, as a thought, the expression death does them apart is completely metaphysical.

PHILOSOPHICAL

For nobody really knows that dead lovers do eventually depart their graves for another romantic rendezvous elsewhere in the firmament.

As the great American teacher George Santayana points out in his philosophical materialism, when you die, your will be too dead to even know that you are dead.

Whether people do go somewhere else when they die is a completely metaphysical question which need not concern any practical minded human being.

GRAMMAR RULE

Why not? Because, on earth, what concerns us is completely earthly.

Here what concerns us is that the sub-editor’s words have failed to obey one vital English grammar rule.

All primary school children are familiar with that rule.

It is that every third person singular noun and pronoun must take a verb which, in the simple present tense form, has an “s” ending.

INVENTORS

Since, in the above sentence, “death” is a noun of that kind, acting in a finite manner, the verb which it controls must take an “s” at the end.

Why? That is a question which can be answered only by the person who invented that Euro-Germanic language.

Yet, unfortunately, all the inventors of the language which England has later imposed on most of the human world are long dead.

So what to do? What I myself may say in that context is merely that this is the way of all human speech.

TRANSLATION

Somehow, all human languages are related.

They can, therefore, be translated into one another. Yet every translation may baffle even the world’s greatest linguist.

I must reiterate, however, that in English grammar, the actor — the noun or pronoun which controls such a verb — is a grammatical “person”.

Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]