Our newspapers should learn to avoid ambiguity
What you need to know:
If Kenyans were the world’s best English users, the rest of English-speaking human beings would be in a parlous state.
It is not that Kenya’s users are specifically prone to double speak.
It is only that English confounds the faculties of all its users, including even those of the Englanders who once imposed that language on humanity.
Because I prefer clean natural water, I do not habitually drink any manufactured coloured water called soda. Yet ambiguity is common in our newspapers. And one doubtful characteristic of the world’s most intelligent species is that mere colour — such as that of the human skin — can bend its mind towards thoughts and activities positively perilous to the whole species.
If Kenyans were the world’s best English users, the rest of English-speaking human beings would be in a parlous state. It is not that Kenya’s users are specifically prone to double speak. It is only that English confounds the faculties of all its users, including even those of the Englanders who once imposed that language on humanity.
PLAYS HAVOC
Take this headline (on page 33 of the Daily Nation of May 29): “Coca-Cola launches first alcoholic drink in Japan”. In that manner of writing, you raise some highly important language questions. For instance, exactly what or who was “the first” in that context? In other words, what noun or pronoun was the adjective “first” describing?
In that context, that adjective can refer to one of two possibilities. For, reportedly, what had been launched was the first alcoholic drink that Coca-Cola had ever produced. But, in that case, there was here information of definite news value fit even for page one. It was that Coca-Cola, a controverted soft-drink company, had become a producer and salesman of alcohol, one of the most controverted products of human industry. For alcohol plays havoc with the minds of young human beings the whole world over.
WORLD AFFAIRS
The fact that such news had never reached my ears couldn’t matter because my knowledge is not a precondition for the existence of anything on our world. Millions of things and phenomena exist on earth of which I am not aware. What might have made history was if this had been the first time that the company had exported such a drink to Japan.
Yet, as far as my knowledge of world affairs goes, the American soft drinks company has done neither the one thing nor the other. It is important to relate the newspaper’s statement to my knowledge — and, indeed, to yours and to everybody else’s — because the universally influential American soft drinks company might have scored both achievements without the news having reached our faculty of knowledge.
FREE MARKET
However, though that is a highly unlikely eventuality given today’s technological situation, I assert it confidently. For an intense sense of self-importance is the chief characteristic of all of our world’s controlling individuals, classes, organisations and political states today. Yet if “Coke” had really scored that feat, it would have deafened humanity’s ears all the way from New York City to, say, Kendu, Kakamega, Machakos and Nyeri.
For sales propaganda would have been the chief content of that news item. Ever since Europe’s “free market” rose to world domination, Europe’s self-importance has been the controlling characteristic of all the systems that pass as information — even as “education” — throughout the modern world.
Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]
