Scribbler: I was punched on my left CHICK

Beware sounds and spelling! As we keep cautioning in this space, sounds that make up a particular English word will not always offer you a clue to the way you’ll spell it.

For instance, we have [riid] as present tense for “read” and [reed] as past tense of the same. Then we’ve [riiding] as continuous tense for “read” written “reading”. Then there’s this famous English football team which sounds like it’s associated with colour “red” for it’s pronounced “Redding” yet on paper it is written “Reading”!

Being Wabongo who have mostly been schooled in Kiswahili whose pronunciation and spelling match, we get serious problems contending with such inconsistencies that characterise English! Our introductory gems today provide examples of what we’ve attempted to highlight in the above paragraphs.

On Page 19 of the Saturday, May 30 edition of the tabloid whose boss signs this columnist’s paycheque, there’s a regular contributor’s piece headlined: “This is why I hate baseless ARGUEMENTS’. Too bad here, for the spelling of the capped word—a noun—is wrong. Why? Because, the E that comes after the G shouldn’t be there, like it appears in the verb ARGUE!

As if that wasn’t bad enough for our colleague’s otherwise great piece, as he narrates an incident in which he was punched heavily on one side of his face, he writes:

“’…Look at what you have you have done to me,’ I shouted as I touched my swollen CHICK.”

Oh no! A chick is a baby bird, especially a baby chicken—kifaranga. The area of the face on which our scribbling colleague was smacked is, of course, a CHEEK—shavu.

Another story in the same edition, entitled “Richmond, ex-PM and the race to succeed President Kikwete,” a scribbler says: “After the termination of the contract, Dowans was ordered to remove his power plant from Tanesco… But the company opted to SALE these plants to Tanesco for $60 million.” To sale? No; because “sale” is not a verb—it’s a noun (mauzo). We’re certain the word which our colleague had in mind is SELL, a verb (uza).

And then, on Page 5 of the sister Sunday tabloid of Bongo’s huge and colourful tabloid of June 7, the lead story was headlined “CUF will fight any tricks, declares Maalim Seif’ and the scribbler had this to say:

“CUF secretary general Seif Sharif Hamad has declared that he would not STOP his members TO enter into the streets and protect the party’s results…”

We’ve a problem here: you don’t STOP somebody TO do something; you STOP him FROM doing something.

In another Para, our colleague says: “He urged Isle residents to unite, intoning that CUF will speak with one voice to enable it to win the presidency DESPITE THAT he had contested four times and BEING denied victory repeatedly.”

Despite that he had…? Nope! It should read: DESPITE the fact THAT he had… Or, why not avoid the preposition “despite”—whose usage, like that of “in spite” tends to be too tricky to many of us—and simply say ALTHOUGH?

And, finally, a helping from Page 1 of Bongo’s senior-most daily of Monday, June 8, thanks to a story entitled “AG loses bid to dismiss Kurasini land dispute”. Says the scribbler in his intro:

The Attorney General has lost his bid for dismissal of the multi-million land dispute involving 121 former residents of Kurasini AREA who were FORCIFULLY EVICTED to pave WAY for the expansion of the Dar es Salaam Port.

Tautology. Seasoned readers of this column must be getting tired of this word and to them we say: bear with us. It refers to being wasteful with words, whereby you use a qualifier where it doesn’t add an iota of value to what you’re saying. Like we often do—without any glint of intellectual shame—write in our Kiswahili titles: “…mke wake WA NDOA” or “…mtoto WAKE wa kumzaa MWENYEWE.”

Now EVICT means—and we quote our ‘Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary’ verbatim:

“to FORCE somebody to leave a house or land, especially when you have a legal right to do so.”

And when we say “in Kurasini”, why not just end there instead of qualifying it with AREA? Tautology!

And by the way, we say “pave THE way” not just “pave way”.

Ah, this treacherous language called English!