When such linguistic anomalies creep into newspaper pages they become irritating distractions.
They also cheapen the message intended so that the discerning reader stops caring about what follows.
There has been a running battle between me and a connoisseur of the written word, Githuku Mungai, over a single word and I am afraid he is winning it. The other day, I wrote in this column that one of the functions of an MCA is to “oversight” the county executive and he pounced. The word cannot be used that way, he wrote; “oversee” is the way to go. And then he proceeded to prove it elaborately, leaving me utterly convinced. My only defence is that I used oversight as a verb only because I have seen it done by others. It is common practice in English to verbalise nouns, but maybe it shouldn’t be done all the time.
However, something definitely must be done about the common usage of a number of words and phrases in our newspapers. A few of those usages have a long history, while one or two have their origins in the increasingly popular social media for no particularly good reason, for even with the wide latitude given to language use in this media, some are a result of carelessness. In a platform like Twitter, all the rules of grammar, spelling, tense and even common sense are suspended, but if you go overboard, you can be sure some tweep will tell you that you wasted your parents’ money on school fees.
