Readers’ language clinic (1)

WITHOUT necessarily “joining issues”, Wordsworth intervenes thus: In any form of formal writing, you must contextualize words and expressions generally. It is not just enough to lift from a book or online platforms the etymological history of a word without situating it rightly, which is what contextualization is all about.

A “junta” could correctly be any group of people or mob with a common resolve — not just military or political. It could be labour, academic, institutional, religious, medical and so on. Going by the context of the corrected extract, it is obvious that “military” was glaringly otiose. There is no applicative ambiguity whatsoever as to why “military” should be jettisoned from the excerpt in question. Grammaticality cannot be treated in isolation of context, environment (audience/ target) and communicative objective.

In journalism and, by extrapolation, reportage, there is what is called “tight writing”. You do not waste space and time on clauses and phrases whose meanings are either implied or self-explanatory. Such morphological tragedies are regarded as padding, needless embellishment or tautology in extreme cases.

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I will be wasting precious space of a 1,000-word column and time listing the copious dictionaries, multifarious reference books and exponential online sources that I use here. The most annoying aspect of the curiously anonymous feedback under focus is that when I called the cellphone number, the incorrigible fellow thundered that “I should stop misleading people” and thereafter stopped taking my calls aimed at civilizing him on dynamic syntactic nuances!

This kind of lexical irresponsibility that borders on conservatism, circumscribed knowledge, blissful ignorance and illiterate bookishness smacks of marginal literacy that noisily drums emptily! I welcome readers’ constructive contributions to this debate essentially and especially because I am not a knowledge monopolist!

This column is for the exchange of meaningful and robust ideas on various aspects of the English language and its correct usage—I am merely an active coordinator and a scholar, too, without any professorial pretensions or doctoral ascriptions! Also, I am not infallible, just like all other human beings.

In summation, I insist that “military junta”, as excerpted above, is incontrovertibly, unquestionably, unassailably and unimpeachably wrong contextually. No General torpedoes a government with kid-gloves — and will the junta in that case not be military? So, why write “military junta” in that circumstance?

EBERE, thank you, I have always been accused of being pedantic when I point out blunders by our supposedly educated journalists/ speakers/legislators, not realising it irks other readers too.

• Uwem Ekpoudom

I HAVE always respected your person and your views on certain issues until defending your principal became your passion. That aside, what did you mean by “even the Bible … has contradictions, if not fallacies … the edition of reference is important and critical because what is right today may be wrong tomorrow”? Please, explain because I noticed that you have conveniently avoided mentioning holy Quran to avoid possible backlash. But the Bible is always a fair game!

• Fred K.D. (08036166374)