Malapropisms, interrogative and compound words

One of the problems with the use of homophones is malapropism. Malapropism is the unconscious habit of using similar-sounding words wrongly; often, with an unintended touch of humour. It is a practice that, unnoticed, might be a common problem with newspaper stories.

A few cases were brought to my attention last week by a reader who has been following this column.

The malapropisms she brought to my attention from some insert magazines in The Standard were: ‘a ‘jerk’ of all trades’ and ‘men lording it over women, since they (men) think they sit on a ‘thrown’. In the first case, the proper idiomatic expression is ‘a ‘jack’ of all trades’.

By using ‘jerk’, which is a derogatory term for an extremely obnoxious person, there is humour because jerks are not known for any particular trade.

In the second case, a man would sit on a ‘throne’, not ‘thrown’; the latter is the past participle of ‘throw’, meaning to propel something through the air with an element of force using the hand(s), hurl, catapult.

Televised debate

I picked up another malapropism from a televised debate during which an analyst while condemning those who did the logical thing to find out who the owner of a car captured on camera knocking down two demonstrators on Uhuru Highway last Monday was, confidently said, “NASA followers should have looked for the driver of the vehicle that ‘overrun’ the two demonstrators instead of the owner”.

To overrun means to spread over, continue beyond, to exceed allotted time or cost. How then would this tie in with cars and demonstrators? Ideally, the speaker should have used the phrasal verb ‘run over’ than have the words in reverse order and as a single word.

Not too long ago, before Kenya Power and Lighting Company became Kenya Power Company, many people would be heard talking about Kenya Power and ‘Lightening’ Company’.

To some, the difference between ‘lighting’ and ‘lightening’ did not register.

The headline; ‘Did we learn ‘nothing’ from 2007?’, taken from one of the local dailies last week, posed a rhetorical question.

A rhetorical question is one that does not need an answer. Can this question be considered good form? No. Good form should have been: ‘Did we learn anything from 2007?’

If the pronoun ‘nothing’ formed the answer rather than the question, that would have been acceptable. ‘Nothing’ is not an interrogative word, hence not apt for asking a question.

The description of nothing is ‘zero’. On the other hand, anything means ‘a thing of any kind’. The object of learning is to get ‘something’. If we set out to learn, it cannot be about ‘zero’, so to speak.

Besides the words ‘nothing’ and ‘anything’, there are the other words, ‘something’ and ‘everything’ which complicate matters for some English language users.

Commonly used

The word ‘something’ is commonly used in positive or affirmative sentences in which the subject is engaged in a certain activity.

Examples are, ‘aeroplanes fly’, ‘boats sail’, ‘the sun rises or sets’. These actions end up making a positive assertion on the noun in motion.

‘Everything’ means all. It is a word one can employ in both affirmative, negative or interrogative sentences.

A tweet addressed to me by @Dismoh, Dismas Kogo directed me to a headline in The Standard last Thursday that had his mind in a fog.

Apparently, the headline, ‘Strangers visit school attack victim in hospital’ made no sense to him.

The difficulty may have arisen from where Kogo mentally paused while reading the headline, say, ‘Strangers... visit school attack... victim in hospital’ or ‘Strangers visit... school-attack victim... in hospital’.

While the wording remains the same, the understanding, as demonstrated above, differs. This emphasises the importance of properly placed punctuation marks.

There are times when a reader misses the point simply because he or she laid emphasis, or paused at the wrong point in a sentence.

Had the independent words ‘school’ and ‘attack’ been used as a compound word, that would have lessened the grey areas in the sentence.

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The Standard. [email protected]