Learn some logic to communicate clearly as a scribe
What you need to know:
This problem takes place all the time in Kenya’s English-language newspapers and such other English-language media of information as radio and television.
In these electronic others, it occurs especially through the mouths of politicians and priests.
Apparently, like the rest, these individuals never even heard of the word “comma” when they were learning a language.
"After" is a word of sequence which occurs in practically all court stories in Kenya’s newspapers. Here is a typical example: “Five terrorism suspects accused of violently robbing a policeman of his gun and shooting him yesterday won round one of their case after a court set them free”. I culled that gemstone of illogic from page 12 of the Daily Nation of May 8, 2018.
The allegation stared at you as hideously as Medusa’s face. I call it an allegation because the writer’s sense of time has gone completely haywire. One question that immediately entered the mind of the language-conscious reader was: Did the “suspects” win their case only “after” the judicial official had pronounced his or her judgment?
ADDUCED
Of course, not. They had already won it during the arguments and counter-arguments in front of the particular judicial official. The judge or magistrate was merely affirming this victory when he or she pronounced his or her decision. The point is that the “suspects” had won it — not through the judge’s speech — but much earlier, namely, by means of witness-evidence cogently adduced.
This problem takes place all the time in Kenya’s English-language newspapers and such other English-language media of information as radio and television. In these electronic others, it occurs especially through the mouths of politicians and priests. Apparently, like the rest, these individuals never even heard of the word “comma” when they were learning a language.
PREACHER
Where communication of thought is your chief “calling”, this was among the first things you should have learned when you were training as a communicator, namely, as a journalist or a preacher of words designed especially to give your society a much better shape, and of religion — that other method by which certain individuals hope to turn human minds towards the celeste.
It is a problem, then, of the language by which we exchange our experiences in the activity of creating our collective survival means. If language is how you hope to bend your people’s collective mind into a certain direction, then you had best completely tame the language available to you.
TROUBLESOME
If English is the one, then you had best master and tame that Latino-Germanic European tool completely. No, admittedly, English is not a particularly easy language. There are areas in which the language of England — which is at bottom a Germanic tool thoroughly complicated by certain superstructural thought-nuances borrowed from certain Mediterranianites — is an admittedly troublesome language.
For, through language, communication depends desperately on logic. It is a problem particularly of how to arrange one’s words effectively in the process of communicating a thought-experience in order to maximise the communicator’s life and defence contribution to one’s own community.
IDEAS
For the evolutionary acquisition of communication of thought-experience through words is probably the human ability par excellence. That is why it is vital for a journalist to use the official language correctly. For, on our planet, intra-specific communication of ideas taken from experience is the summit of evolution of what we call life.
Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]
