One misplaced word can lead to embarrassment in your newspaper

In the headline “Karua seeks fresh audit of voting materials in petition” (page 19 of the April 24 number of the Daily Nation), a sub-editor raised an important question that Kenya’s newspaper sub-editors raise again and again. Here the question was ineluctable because, in that context, what exactly are “voting materials in petition”?

Yet that question arises only because of a terrible misplacement of words in your sentence. Whoever wrote that headline does not seem to know how important it is always to put all parts of speech in their correct places in a sentence. It is the only way I know in which anybody can succeed in informing another accurately.

CLARITY

The question, ineluctable in that context, is this: What exactly are “voting materials in petition”?  In other words, in what way can “voting materials” petition anybody? Where information is your advertised stock-in-trade, that question is simply ineluctable. For, in that context, the problem is: What exactly are “voting materials in petition”? 

In other words, in what way have “voting materials” ever petitioned anybody? Indeed, how do “voting materials” differ from all other materials known to the tempestuous world of political elections? Yet the question arises only because the writer has failed the test of clarity and the sub-editor has proved unequal to the task of helping the writer onto the path of  good language.

SEMANTICS

The reason that the locution poses such an embarrassing question is that, in the given sentence, the two journalists — the reporter and the sub-editor — have terribly misplaced the adverbial phrase “in petition”. For, here, to all clear-minded users of English, the phrase “in petition” has exactly the same general semantic import as the phrase “in court” or “in a court of law”.

It was in exactly such a context that Ms Karua — that never-say-die political activist — had acted.  Thus, in this context, at least, the phrase in petition means exactly the same thing as the phrase in a court of law. For it was from such a court that the petitioner had hoped to obtain political justice. The reporter, then, is the original source of the problem, the sub-editor merely having failed to help return the reporter to the correct path of language.

INFORMATION

It is that, in that same context at least, the words in a court of law have more or less the same semantic import as the expression in a petition. That exactly is why it is disgustingly tautological for anybody to use both phrases inside the same verbal brackets. As we have seen here umpteen times before, tautology is repetition in the objective part of one’s statement of exactly what one has already said or written in the subjective part.

You simply and terribly embarrass the editors and the owner of your newspaper, especially after all of them have told the public — not once but a myriad of times — that clear-minded and accurate information is what their newspaper is in the marketplace to sell so lucratively to the public.

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