You cannot simply condole the bereaved
What you need to know:
The verb to condole requires a special preposition. You condole, namely, with. In other words, to condole with is to join those others in sorrow.
For, emotionally, those others are usually equally bereaved or – as a celebrated English dramatist would have put it – “bereft”.
As far as my knowledge of English goes, you can never simply “condole” anybody.
To condole with is to join another or others in sorrow, usually over the death of a loved one. Condolence is thus composed of words of sorrow sent to those bereaved or – as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poetic licence – those “bereft”.
SORROWFUL
At mankind’s habitual violence against nature, when it was committed somewhere in rural England in the great poet’s time, Hopkins mourned: “What would the world be once bereft of … wildness and wet?” It moved the poet to beg the powers-that-be above the clouds: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
To condole with literally means “to be sad with”, namely, “to join another or others in their sorrow at a misfortune, for instance, at the loss of a loved one. But it still raises a question: “condole”? Did Uhuru Kenyatta really “condole NMG boss,” as the Nation claimed in a prominent headline after the Nation’s board chairman, Mr Wilfred Kiboro, had lost a relative the other day? As far as my knowledge of English goes, you can never simply “condole” anybody.
It is only with others who are mourning the same death that you can “condole”. That is clear because the word condole is composed of con (“with”) and dole (“sorrow”). Dole, from the French douleur, is what gives us the English adjective dolorous, meaning “sorrowful” or “sad”. Genuinely, then, the condolence message that President Kenyatta sent to the bereaved family was primarily from his own heart.
EMOTIONALLY
What is more, you don’t simply condole. No, the verb to condole requires a special preposition. You condole, namely, with. In other words, to condole with is to join those others in sorrow. For, emotionally, those others are usually equally bereaved or – as a celebrated English dramatist would have put it – “bereft”.
The noted dramatist posed: “What would the world be once bereft of wildness and wet? Let them be left, O, let them b left, wildness and wet/Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Apparently, a world so bereft was not imaginable, even to a mind as large as Gerard Manley Hopkins’. So he prayed to the Powers-That-Be: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Thus, whenever you are the leader of, for instance, a country’s opposition party, “we need no ghost to tell us” – as the celebrated English dramatist put it – that you will send a “condolence” message whenever some political heavyweight loses a relative.
EXPRESSING
To condole, then, literally means “to sadden with,” namely, to “join in sadness”.
In other words, to condole is to join others in their “dole”, namely, in their dolorousness, two words which probably joined English only as recently as when France controlled the island country called Britain a few centuries ago.
It is thus that, once a person is bereaved or, as the poet puts it, once he or she is bereft, whenever you send a “condolence message” to her or him, you are expressing your own sadness concerning that same loss.
Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist
