OUR KIND OF ENGLISH: Poison child ‘to death’; buy ‘female’ sex ‘workers’

Let‘s start with an apology to our esteemed readers who missed this column last Sunday. One Mr KL of Kagera wrote to demand that we refund his hard-earned Sh1,000! Well, even as we look into how we’ll deliver KL’s “buku”, we must hasten to appreciate his indirect way of paying us a compliment. We’re humbled.

Having said that, we’ll move on by first sharing what another reader, Mr JK of Tabata, Dar availed us. His are gems he picked from the Wed, Sept edition of the tabloid associated with this columnist. In the story entitled, ‘State wants presidential terms case dismissed;’ the scribbler—purporting to inform readers what State Attorney Daniel Nyakiha told a panel of judges—writes in Para 4:

“…an affidavit supporting the petition was DEFECTING for not meeting some legal requirements.”

Defecting? No way, we say! Indeed, JK is certain the scribbler set out to say the petition was DEFECTIVE, meaning, it had defects, weaknesses or shortcomings.

Further down in Para 9, we read the scribbler’s reportage of what petitioner Dezydelius Mgoya’s matter in court is all about: “Mr Mgoya filed the constitutional petition IN August 30, questioning the legality of the presidential term limit.”

In August 30? Nope! When the day of the month in question is stated, the preposition isn’t IN; it’s ON—the petition was filed ON August 30. Come Sat, Sept 21, and Bongo’s huge and colourful broadsheet had this story, ‘Mbeya villager arrested over child’s death’ and the intro reads:

“Police in Mbeya Region are holding a woman for allegedly “poisoning TO DEATH her child aged one-year-old...”

Poisoning a child “to death” is logically suspect, for it’s like there was a continuous or repetitive act of subjecting the now departed child to a killer mixture…till he/she died. How about saying, “Police in Mbeya Region are holding a woman for allegedly KILLING HER CHILD WITH POISON…”?

On the same page, there’s another story entitled, ‘Shein: Zanzibar to cement relations with Comoros’, and in Para 8, the scribbler from the Clove Isles purports to quote President Ali Mohammed Shein as telling his important guest, Comorian President Azali Assoumani: “Zanzibar is cool and safe; we welcome you to have A PLEASURE and comfortable stay.”

A pleasure stay? Oh, no! Our scribbling colleague is suggesting that “pleasure” is an adjective defining the kind of stay visitors in Zanzibar can enjoy. Wrong! The adjective is PLEASANT. Dr Shein assured his VIP guest a “pleasant (not pleasure) and comfortable stay.”

And then, on Page 7 there’s this story, ‘Support govt effort to serve people better, Dodoma DC asks CSCs’. In this one, the scribbler purports to quote DC Patrobas as saying, “We have resolved to carry our operation on men who buy FEMALE SEX WORKERS since if the market is still there, there will be prostitutes on the street.”

Do we really have men who buy female sex workers? We doubt it. The men simply BUY SEX from sex workers.

Ah, this treacherous language called English!

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