OCHIENG: The atrocity of language use in newsrooms today

If you work for the editorial department of an English language publication, you should be the first to know that media is a plural word which English borrowed from Latin and that medium is its singular form. So the phrase “The media is …” — which appears daily in Kenya’s English-language newspapers — is a travesty of language.

The correct expression should be “The media are …” For, indeed, as one celebrated European social critic reminds us, “The medium is the message.” As should be obvious, there can be no message if it has not passed through some medium. Of the many implications of that statement, at least one has an extraordinarily powerful message.

It is that a message is possible only if it passes through a medium. Let me reiterate it. Without a medium, there can be no message. Yet the confusion continues to reign throughout the human world. It was among the reasons that, when I first joined The Nation’s newsroom as a trainee reporter in the early 1960s, our on-the-job British journalism trainers never tired of cautioning us to prefer English expressions to their Greek, Latin and especially American counterparts. Of course, it made good sense.

For, if yours is an English-language medium, why on this earth should you need to use words and expressions from any other language system on any of your pages?

Yet there are good reasons that Greek, Latin and, in East Africa, Kiswahili words and expressions are sometimes necessary in our English language media — especially concerning certain existential and intellectual activities.

The answer is that there are areas of social activity and thought — especially in academia — where English desperately depends on classical Latin and Greek words and expressions.

We, in the print media, continually draw attention to such words and phrases by printing them in the slanted form available to the publishing world as italics.

On numerous, occasions, it is absolutely necessary to use a word from any other Kenyan language. In Kenya, for example, very many ethnic activities and items are now in national use for which the media and the corridors of power have no adequate English or Kiswahili counterparts.

Our English-language newspapers frequently try to get around that problem by using Dholuo, Greek, Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Kiswahili or Latin words and phrases, usually italicising them to show that they do not belong to English, the language in which our media can reach the educated class throughout East Africa and the world.

But I see no problem in that context as long as the sub-editors are keenly aware of the communication problem involved. As a rule, moreover, our newspapers continually draw the readers’ attention to the non-English words and expressions that we use by printing them in italics.

All the words and phrases through which members of a culturo-linguistic community communicate belong to a chosen language — usually English in the former English colonies.