Saying ‘late mom left 8 children; 3 girls and 5 boys’ is nonsensical!
There was a story that appeared in the business section of one of Bongo’s daily broadsheets recently (June 6), entitled, ‘Training and internship for youth ARE unveiled in Geita to curtail youth unemployment’. What a mouthful of a headline, commented a reader who drew our attention to this story that “we had overlooked!”
Indeed, 13 words for a headline are a wee bit too many for a headline, if you ask us, the perennially fussy critics that we are. What’s more, the linking verb “are” is quite unnecessary in the longish headline. As any seasoned subeditor will tell you, linking verbs are best dropped in headlines so that they (headlines) don’t sound like sentences!
At the middle of the story, the scribbler reports that the Geita training and internship project has so far benefitted 258 graduates from across the country.
He then continues: “Of these, 41 PER CENT are women and 59 PER CENT are men.” The information about 59 per cent being men is most unnecessary. Giving that information is entertaining redundancy! Why, after stating that 41 out of every 100 are women, you don’t need to tell your reader that the remaining are 59 men, unless you suspect he’s a complete buffoon.
It would be like this columnist telling an audience: “My mother Mwantum Issa Liana, who died in 1976, left behind 8 children, 3 of them girls and the remaining 5, boys.” Nonsensical, isn’t it?
Let’s now have a look at Bongo’s huge and colourful edition of Friday, June 13 whose Page 4 has a story with the headline, ‘Zanzibar has rescued 1,630 children from child labour’. In his intro, the scribbler writes the following: “Zanzibar has SUCCESSFULY rescued A TOTAL OF 1,630 children from child labour and those at risk of entering such employment.”
Hang on! Does the adverb “successfully” add any value to the verb “rescued”? Not at all, we can assert with confidence. Furthermore, the adjectival phrase “a total of” is redundant too because it doesn’t tell the reader anything more than what the number has said by itself. Which is to say, it would have been enough for the scribbler to simply say this: “Zanzibar has rescued 1,630 children from child labour…”
By the way, when you say such and such a number of persons have been “successfully,” rescued, you provide your audience with the ridiculous assumption that there’re cases whereby persons are “unsuccessfully” rescued!
We’ll wind up the column with a couple of gems from Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet of Saturday, June 14, thanks to a Page 4 story entitled, ‘Tanzania, Rwanda revisit border security’.
Therein, the scribbler—who’s reporting on what a district supremo said during a meeting on security that attracted participants from a neighbouring country—writes in Para 3: “He was speaking on Tuesday in Ngara Town while opening a five-DAYS meeting that also attracted a delegation of officials from Rwanda.”
A five-days meeting…? Oh, nope! We say a five-DAY meeting. Just as we say a five-year period and not a five-years period; a three-day holiday and not a three-days holiday, etc.
In Para 5 the scribbler purports to quote the same district boss as saying: “Rwanda and Tanzania have a long history THUS A NEED to CEMENT our common borders…”
We note that a comma (,) is missing after the word “history.” And then, using the verb “cement” as a figure of speech (idiomatically) to mean strengthening good neighbourliness amongst border populations is misleading. We propose that our scribbling colleague should’ve said, “…to cement good relations of our people who share borders.”
Ah, this treacherous language called English!
