I wouldn’t demand ‘for’ quality service

Why has the quality of Kenya’s goods and services taken a nosedive? It tugs at the heart, however, that a Cabinet secretary is one of those disturbed by this sad state of affairs.

I know this because, in a TV commercial, the minister has, for two weeks, been challenging our consumers to “demand for quality service” from the government.

He makes it clear that language is among the goods and services whose quality the Kenya Bureau of Standards needs to fix. Were I in charge of KEBS’s English Department, I would simply “demand” things. I wouldn’t “demand for” them.

It is the only way to travel light in a country where they have not yet invented a system for checking in excess (linguistic) baggage. For, with the verb “to demand”, the preposition “for” is an unnecessary load, a complete waste.

Our journalists spent the whole of last week demanding their rights (not demanding for them). Likewise, Mr Atwoli and his lieutenants use a great deal of energy to “demand” (not “demand for”) higher wages for their wards.

The problem for the teacher is that the language is as systemless as the City of Nairobi. There is no straight and sure road. There is no grammar rule which holds good throughout. As Mark Twain says of The Awful German Language, the exceptions to each rule often outnumber the instances of it.

But nothing gives the student as much trouble as the preposition. For there is just no rule as to what class of verbs should take a given preposition. The student must learn each case separately. For instance, though I know that it is better to congratulate on than to congratulate for, I can cite no rule!

Moreover — as demand shows — many verbs do not take prepositions. Others to which we wrongly attach the preposition “for” include “to advocate” and “to contest”. Our newspapers are full of claims such as that a priest “advocated for peace” and that a politician “will contest for a seat”.

Utter nonsense. A priest worth his salt will merely advocate peace (not “for” it) and a self-respecting politician will merely contest a seat (not “for” it).

But what is a preposition? It is a word or phrase used before a noun or pronoun to express its position, movement or circumstance.

In the sentence “Pride comes before a fall”, the word before indicates the grammatical position of the noun pride.

The word preposition is derived from two Latin elements: prae (before) and positio or positum (position). Praepositio or raepositum thus literally means a putting before.

Here are a few prepositions: above, after, at, atop, away, below, beneath, beside, between, betwixt, beyond, from, in, into, on, out of, under, upon, up to, within” and without.

But there are a plethora and the reporter is advised to learn them all. In particular, he must muster the fixed idiomatic expressions in which they occur. Mastery of idioms is the mark of whether you know English.

Mr Ochieng is a veteran journalist.