A syntactical mistake that can easily goad people to arms

An idiom is a group of words whose collective meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words.

For instance, “nip in the bud” means neither “nip” nor “bud”. To nip (verb) is to pinch or to give something a quick and painful bite, like pulling a thorn from a friend’s flesh. A bud (noun) is a small lump that grows on a plant and later opens into a flower, leaf or stem.

From that colourful botanic phenomenon, we have also derived meanings that are purely metaphorical. The atom was but a bud in the heads of Imhotep, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and other classical Egypto-Hellenic philosophers.

PRESSURES

The atom effloresced ( “flowered” or bloomed) into today’s quantum mechanics only after John Dalton formulated the modern atomic theory and the law of partial pressures of gases.

But an idiom is a linguistic bromide. You cannot tamper with the words. They can maintain their collective meaning only if they remain together in the same sequence, and only if no other word is intruded into them.

Take this headline from the Saturday Nation: “Constitution nips US-style of freely defaming public officials in the bud”. In this statement, the verb “nips” has been separated from the rest of the idiom by a whole seven words, which do not belong to the idiom. Because the words that compose the idiom have been alienated or divorced or estranged, the idiom’s power has evaporated.

Moreover, syntax has gone haywire. In any language, syntax is the way words and phrases are put together so that they form a meaningful sentence. An idiom can thus be described as syntaxfossilised.

SYNTACTICAL MISTAKES

Our newspapers are fraught with syntactical mistakes, namely, sentences in which certain words occur in quite the wrong places. A wrongly placed word may mean that the communicator is not communicating what is in his mind. Thus he may goad the audience into an action – perhaps a socially perilous one – which the communicator did not intend.

A war may erupt simply because the diplomat we sent to the round table had not really “domesticated” the language in use. By making a simple syntactical mistake, he may goad the other party into rushing to arms.

From diplomatic dispatches recently made available to me, I know that most of Kenya’s diplomats have no communication training. And their grasp of English is appallingly weak. No wonder our diplomacy is catastrophic.

Because the phrase “in the bud” is in the wrong place (and too far away), it has lost touch with the word “constitution”, which is supposed to be its grammatical subject. And we no longer know what the “constitution” is “nipping” or what “to nip” means. For, by separating it from the rest of the idiom, the sub-editor has freed the verb “nip” to mean anything else, including to harm or to damage and to go somewhere quickly or for a short time.

Please respect the idiom’s integrity and write: “Constitution nips in the bud (the) US style of defaming....”

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist