Q and A on Concord, Archaism, and Nigerian English Usage

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

In what follows, I answer readers’ questions on subject-verb agreement, archaisms, whether or not “youth” has a plural, whether or not the phrase “the ordinary Nigerian” is uniquely Nigerian English, and if it is proper to end a sentence with a contraction. Enjoy.

Question:

I am a journalist in Lagos and have never failed to read, nay study, your grammar column since I discovered it a year ago. It’s the only reason I read Sunday Trust. You provide an invaluable service to the journalism profession and to Nigerian education. I hope you never stop. I have a question for you: does the word “youth” have a plural form? Can one say “youths”? Many editors here insist that youth is a collective noun that has no plural form. Is that correct?

Answer:

The notion that “youth” has no plural is one annoyingly persistent superstition in Nigerian grammar circles. I can relate to your frustration. When I worked briefly at the New Nigerian, my editor once changed every reference to “youths” in my news report to “youth.” I told him he was wrong; that “youth” can have a plural form depending on the context of its usage. He insisted he was right and marred my story with his ignorance. As Alexander Pope says, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

The straightforward answer to your question is, yes, “youth” does have a plural form, and it is “youths.” But a little nuance is in order. “Youth” can mean “a young man.” When it is used in that sense, its plural is “youths.” It is entirely correct to say or write “youths from the Niger Delta protested at the National Assembly.” It is the same thing as saying “young men from the Niger Delta protested at the National Assembly.”

Note, though, that when “youth” is used in this sense, it is often derogatory. The Oxford English Corpus reveals that, in the last few years, the majority of references to “youths” in popular usage have an undisguised tone of disapproval. The word appears in phrases like “gang of youths,” “unruly youths,” “unemployed youths,” “disaffected youths,” “drunken youths,” etc.  That was not the case in the distant past. Nor should it always be the case.

The sense of youth that does not take a plural form is when it is used as a collective noun to mean young people of both sexes, as in “the youth of Nigerian has been disillusioned by mass unemployment after graduation.” When youth is used in an abstract sense to mean the state of being young, it also does not take a plural form. Example: “During the youth of the projects we were all united.”

This distinction is often lost on Nigerian editors who seem to have adopted a policy of blanket ban on the plural form of “youth.”

Question:

I had an argument with a group of Nigerians who insisted that the phrase “the ordinary Nigerian” is Nigerian English, which they said is elitist and derogatory to common people. I thought I would pick your brain on this. Is “ordinary Nigerian” uniquely Nigerian and is it demeaning?

Answer:

“The ordinary Nigerian” is a perfectly legitimate expression. There is nothing uniquely Nigerian about it. Nor is there anything even remotely pejorative about it. All English-speaking people have a version of that expression in their demotic speech. For instance, Americans habitually use the expression “the ordinary American” to mean the average American. There is even a website called "the ordinary American." When they don’t say “the ordinary American,” they say “the Average Joe,” “ the Ordinary Joe,” “Joe Sixpack” (for males because Joe is common male first name in America) and “Ordinary Jane,” “ the Average Jane,” or “Plain Jane” (for females because Jane is a common female first name in America).

British people also say “the ordinary Briton,” “the ordinary Brit,” “the ordinary British person,” etc. to refer to the average person in the street. Celebrated British playwright George Bernard Shaw once famously said “The ordinary Britisher imagines that God is an Englishman.”

The ordinary Canadian, the ordinary Australian, etc. are usual phrases people use as a stand-in for the average person in the street. There is not a whiff of condescension in the phrase.

Question:

I continue to follow your columns and find them a useful addition to my readings. Kindly look at the title of your Weekly Trust column that reads: “Tribute to Teachers Who Made Me Who I’m.”  Should it end as "I'm" or "I am"?  Why do I think it should be the latter?

Answer:

Thanks for your kind comment, and for calling my attention to the apparent syntactic awkwardness of the headline of my article. Yes, you're right that ending a sentence with a contraction (such as “I'm,” “can’t,” “don’t,” etc.) seems rather unnatural. But there is no rule against it that I can find in any grammar book. That is why Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, the acclaimed nineteenth-century English dramatist who contributed a lot to modern spoken and written English, could write in his comic opera titled Ruddigore:  “Avoid an existence of crime/ Or you will be as ugly as I'm.”

Notice that he ended the last sentence with "I'm" like I did. In my case, though, I contracted "I am" to “I’m” because I wanted to conserve headline space. As you probably know, rules of proper sentence construction don't often apply to headlines because, by nature, headlines are not always complete sentences. They are often sentence fragments and sometimes intentionally violate certain grammatical rules in the service of space and brevity. Linguists call headline English “headlinese.”

Question:

Which of the following statements is correct: 1. “The top management team comprise of…. 2. “The top management team comprises of…”

Answer:

None is correct. It should be “the top management team comprises...” In proper grammar, the verb “comprise” does not admit of the preposition “of.” I have written about this in previous articles. The reason “comprise of” is considered improper grammar is that “comprise” means “consists of” or “composed of.” That means the addition of the preposition “of” after “comprise” is needlessly repetitive. In other words, “comprise,” “consist of,” and “compose of” are synonymous. Although “comprise of” appears even in native-speaker English, it is stigmatized as uneducated usage.

But you probably just wanted to know what the subject-verb agreement between “top management team” and “comprise” should be. In other words, you wanted to know if collective nouns (such as “team,” “committee,” “majority,” “jury,” “family,” “audience,” etc.) agree with a singular or a plural verb? The answer isn’t straightforward.

 In British English, collective nouns agree with both singular and plural verbs depending on the meaning the speaker or writer intends to convey. If I regard a family as one cohesive unit, I would say something like “the family HAS agreed to visit us today.” But if I think of the family as composed of individuals, I would say something like “The family HAVE agreed to visit us today.” If we apply this to your question, either “the top management team comprises” or “the top management team comprise” would be correct.

In American English, however, collective nouns always agree with singular verbs. That means, using your example again, only “the top management team comprises…” would be correct in American English.

Question:

Please I would like to know the meaning of “twoscore.” I have checked my dictionary but could not find the meaning. Malam Adamu Adamu did a piece in the Daily Trust a few days back with the title "ABU at twoscore." I could not understand what he meant.

Answer:

Twoscore is an archaic word for 40. You didn't find it in a modern dictionary because most people no longer use it. However, although it’s an archaic word, it can be used in modern writing for literary effects. This is true of all archaisms.

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The Sexual Harassment Epidemic in Nigerian Universities

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

This week, two sensational, high-profile stories have helped to push the epidemic of sexual harassment of female students in Nigerian universities to the forefront of public consciousness. As a university teacher myself and the father of two daughters, I am disconcerted that sexual harassment has been left to flourish luxuriantly on Nigerian university campuses.

On June 10, several of my Facebook friends and Twitter followers shared the disquieting story of a Delta State University lecturer by the name of Ifeanyi Ugwu Raphael who was caught red-handed while attempting to have sex with his female student whom he’d promised to give a passing grade in return for sexual favors. Pictures of the lecturer’s scroungy, naked body now litter Nigerian cyber spaces.

The story was that the lecturer, as was his wont, made several sexual advances to the female student, which she serially rebuffed. The lecturer then “got even” with her by failing her. This happened when she was in her second year. Now that she is about to graduate and needs the course to satisfy her graduation requirements, she approached the lecturer to ask what it would take to pass his course. As expected, he asked for a tryst.

The student informed her male friends about this, and her friends encouraged her to invite the lecturer to her apartment. Like sheep to the slaughter, the lecturer visited the student in her apartment, immediately took off his clothes, and was salivating in anticipation of what he thought he was going to do when the student’s male friends barged in and stopped him dead in his tracks. His naked pictures were taken and splashed all over the Internet.

A day later, we read the story of a 66-year-old Professor Festus David Kolo of Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria who was sentenced to two months in prison for sexually harassing a pregnant married woman. After pestering the woman, who is a postgraduate student, with numberless phone calls, sexually explicit text messages, and unrelenting verbal entreaties, he invited her to a guest house for a liaison. Unknown to him, the police and the woman’s husband had been informed and were lying in wait for him.  Like Raphel of Delta State University, he was caught pants down—literally—with the pregnant married woman.  In an interesting twist, the woman’s husband, Muhammad Isyaku, is also a lecturer at a different institution.

These two cases are only samples of the culture of flagrant sexual harassment of female students that has taken deep roots on Nigerian university campuses. Our university campuses have become malodorous moral cesspools where lewd, degenerate lecturers prey on female students with impunity.  There is no parent of girls in Nigeria who is not profoundly concerned about sending their girls to Nigerian universities. It’s almost like sending sheep to a pack of wolves.

And it keeps getting worse every day. Lecturers don’t just sexually harass or rape their students; some now pimp them to rich men. I am familiar with a particularly perturbing case of a lecturer who was found guilty of pimping his pretty female students to top military officers in exchange for handsome financial reward. The military officers would go and “survey” the female students in his class. They would then let him know which girls caught their fancy. The lecturer would call the students and tell them to go have sex with his “clients.” Students who spurned his command were threatened with permanent “carry-over.”

One day, one female student who had had enough of the lecturer’s shenanigans decided to report him to the chair of his department. The case went up to the university senate and scores of students came forward to testify against the pimping lecturer. In the end, he confessed to his transgressions. Shockingly, however, he only received a warning from the university authorities. I hear the man still pimps his female students but does it in more careful ways.

Of course, not all university lecturers take advantage of their female students. Many lecturers, in fact, are conscientious, morally upright people who would never demand sexual favors from their female students or pimp them to rich folks. But this fact does not vitiate the truth that our universities are beset by a disturbing culture of sexual harassment and that female students, especially good-looking female students, are a vulnerable group on Nigerian university campuses.

This is so because there are no clear, unmistakable laws against sexual harassment in the statutes of our universities. And because there are no explicit boundaries for what constitutes sexual harassment or laws against it, there are no consequences for engaging in it. At the very least, lecturers found guilty of sexual harassment should have their appointments terminated outright.

That is the way it is in America where I teach. A teacher cannot be romantically entangled with a student he or she teaches even if the relationship is consensual. Similarly, a lecturer cannot make sexually suggestive comments, jokes, or gestures to a student—any student. Doing so constitutes grounds for termination of appointment if found guilty. That is why on June 11, an appeals court upheld the firing of a professor here who made sexually explicit jokes to his students when he took them on a study-abroad program in Spain in 2010.

The professor, identified as Robert Ammon Jr., had had a little too much beer and, in a moment of intoxication, said one of his female student would be his favorite student "if she sucked my d--k." That was it. His university, the Slippery Rock University in the state of Pennsylvania, fired him for sexual harassment. He appealed against his firing, but an appeals court upheld it on June 11.

That is how it should be. Being put in a position to nurture the minds of young people is a sacred responsibility. There should be grave consequences for betraying this responsibility. I hope the National Universities Commission and the Academic Staff Union of Universities will consider the criminalization of sexual harassment a priority before our universities turn into graveyards for women.

Between Useless and Useful Tautologies in English (II)

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

For the part I, click this link

A reader called my attention to the fact that Aso Rock is also a tautonym in the class of Lake Chad and Lagos Lagoon. He said “Aso” is the Gbagyi word for “rock” so that, were it not for the fact that “aso” and “rock” belonged to two mutually unintelligible languages, Aso Rock would translate as “Rock rock.” I also learned recently that “Sahara desert” is a tautonym because “sahara” is the Arabic word for “great desert.” But as I said last week, grammarians have no problems with tautological place names because they aid clarity. They belong to what I have termed socially favored tautologies.

 But there is a wide range of tautological expressions in English that invite the scorn and rebuke of the grammar police and that careful writers avoid. I call those types of tautologies socially disfavored tautologies. There are at least four types that I can identify: the RAS syndrome, semantic redundancies, double comparatives/superlatives, and double negatives.

 The RAS syndrome. The phrase stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. It is deliberately repetitive to call attention to the errors it mimics, that is, the tendency to repeat the last words of common abbreviations, such as ATM machine (the “m” in ATM stands for “machine”), PIN number (the “n” in PIN stands for “number”), HIV virus (the “v” in HIV stands for “virus”), OPEC countries (the “C” in OPEC stands for “countries”), RAM memory, etc.  The RAS syndrome is easier to avoid in writing than in speaking, and some authorities actually say it is justified in speech because it reinforces meaning and clarity.

Semantic redundancies. These are expressions that are universally ridiculed as needlessly repetitive. Examples are “both the two of them” (both already implies “two-ness”), “return back,” “adequate enough,” “repeat again,” “new innovation,” “added bonus,” “kill to death,” “short summary,” “joint collaborations,” “fellow colleague,” “loud bang,”etc. These expressions get a bad rap for being redundant because people in the symbolic language power structure (prescriptivist grammarians, English teachers, journalists, etc.) frown at them—for now. The socially favored tautologies I mentioned last week aren’t syntactically or semantically different from these socially disfavored ones. Many people avoid them just because they don’t want to be thought of as ignorant. But there is really no logic to the acceptance and rejection of certain tautologies.

Having said that, there are some expressions that are grammatically problematic in addition to being tautological. One of such expression is “was a former,” which appears regularly in native-speaker English. In Longman Guide to English Usage, Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut, two leading authorities in English grammar, say the expression is indefensible. “It is illogical to say that any living person was a former anything. Do not write: Our new chairman was the former company secretary. You can say either that he is the former secretary or that he was formerly the secretary.”

The consensus among grammarians seems to be that somebody who “was a former” anything is dead. If he “is a former” something, he is alive but no longer in his previous position.

Double comparatives/superlatives. The most socially disfavored tautologies are the kinds that repeat the degrees of adjectives. Examples: more better, more fatter, more faster, etc. These are called double comparatives because in modern grammar “more” is prefixed to adjectives to express their comparative degree only if the adjectives don’t have the “er” suffix at the end. For instance, we say “more beautiful” because there is no “er” at the end of “beautiful.” But we can’t say “more prettier” because we have already modified “pretty” to express a comparative degree by adding “er” at the end of the word.

 The same logic applies to words that have both “most” and the “est” suffix such as “most fastest,” “most prettiest,” “most nicest,” etc. Those kinds of expressions are called double superlatives because they contain both “most” before and “est” after the adjectives they modify. “Most” is used only for adjectives that don’t admit of “est” when they are in the superlative degree. Note, though, that this is a relatively recent grammatical rule. As you saw last week, in Shakespearean times, double superlatives and comparatives were perfectly legitimate.

Double negatives: Like double comparatives and double superlatives, double negatives are stigmatized in Standard English and are often avoided by educated people. Double negatives occur when you combine two negations in the same sentence, such as saying "I am not giving it to nobody" or "I didn't give him nothing." "Not," "nobody," "didn't" and "nothing" are all negations whose simultaneous appearance in the same sentence has the effect of canceling each other out and producing a weak positive, according to the logic of modern grammar. So "I am not giving it to nobody" should be "I am not giving it to anybody." Else, it would mean the opposite what it probably intended.

It should be noted that the stigmatization of double negatives in Standard English is relatively recent. It was standard in Old and Middle English, and it has survived in many nonstandard native English dialects such as Ebonics ( or Black English) and Southern US English in America and East London and East Anglian dialects in England. 

Neither socially favored nor disfavored

There are other tautologies that fall in the twilight zone between social favor and disfavor. That is, grammarians don’t seem to either explicitly frown at them or approve of them. For instance, meteorologists in England and America habitually talk of “heavy downpour,” which strikes me—and many people—as tautological, but which is not nearly as ridiculed as other expressions in the same category. A downpour is defined as heavy rain, so a heavy downpour is pleonastic. This same is true of “light drizzle.” A drizzle is light rain.

Other expressions that, in my judgment, fall in this category are “short nap” (a nap is a short sleep), “new beginning,” and “young children.” But the last two can be defended. A fresh opportunity to try something that one had failed in is a new beginning, and that makes logical sense. Similarly, young children can be defended as referring to children under the age of 4. Somebody once asked me if the expression “extreme end” is tautologous and my response was that it was defensible. I wrote that from my perspective, “extreme end” isn't redundant “since an ‘end’ is sometimes a continuum, that is, a continuous succession in which no part or portion is distinct or distinguishable from adjacent parts. So, for instance, we might regard the end of colonialism in Nigeria as beginning from the late 50s and ending in the early 60s. We can legitimately say that the extreme end of colonialism in Nigeria is 1960. Extreme end indicates the very last of the continuum.”

Tautologies exclusive to Nigerian English

All the while, I have been discussing tautologies that are present in all varieties of English, including native-speaker varieties. But there are some tautologies that are exclusively Nigerian. I will mention only a few here. The first that comes to mind is “sendoff party.” First, sendoff isn’t an adjective, nor is it an attributive noun. So it can’t be used before a noun. It is itself a noun that means a party for someone who is leaving a place. That means “sendoff party” is both tautological and ungrammatical. There is also “electioneering campaign,” which has assumed idiomatic status in Nigerian English. Although “electioneering” looks like an adjective, it is actually a noun that means political campaign. Like “sendoff,” it can’t properly be used before another noun. It usually stands alone in Standard English. That is, instead of saying “politicians always lie during electioneering campaigns,” it is sufficient to simply say “politicians always lie during electioneering.”

Another popular tautological expression in Nigerian English that I have called attention to in previous article is “free-for-all fight.” A free-for-all is a noisy street fight. Like sendoff and electioneering, it is also a noun that does not modify another noun. But I can understand why many Nigerians think “free-for-all” as an adjective; it looks like a compound modifier, which its’ not.

Concluding thoughts

In all natural languages, tautologies are inevitable. We all commit tautologies either consciously or unconsciously. I am sure I’ve committed quite a few in this write-up. Tautologies sometimes help give clarity to our thoughts. At other times they intensify, reinforce, and accentuate the messages we seek to convey. They can also be used for literary, aesthetic,  stylistic, and humorous effects. Yet, they can be products of laziness and sloppy thinking.

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When Democracy Makes No Sense

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

I was writing my reflections on the consequences of the embarrassingly infantile electoral banditry exhibited by Nigeria’s governors during the last Nigerian Governors’ Forum election when it occurred to me that I had written a similar article on April 21, 2007 titled “Is this democracy?” in the wake of the mindlessly rigged governorship election that year.  I am taking the liberty to share the article with my readers. It has been edited for space. Except for the dates and personalities nothing has changed. Enjoy.

I think we need to start seriously questioning some of the taken-for-granted assumptions about democracy. Since the collapse of state socialism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, “democracy” has emerged as the unchallenged, unquestioned form of government that every nation is either forced to adopt or aspires to emulate voluntarily.

For us in Nigeria, our nightmarish experience with incredibly venal, reactionary, and enfeebling military absolutism has especially made “democracy” an appealing attraction. Predictably, democracy has now become what scholars of rhetorical studies would call a “charismatic term”— that is, an abstract, often meaningless and empty, concept that nonetheless carries the greatest blessing in a culture and that demands sacrifice and obedience.

Today, to be labeled “anti-democratic” is almost worse than being called a murderer. Politicians now confer legitimacy on their actions—and inactions— by invoking the name of “democracy.”

But is this what we bargained for? No serious person in Nigeria contests the fact that the last eight years represent our country’s worst descent into the low-water mark of despair, hopelessness, and misery. We have witnessed the reversal of our time-honored national fortunes by at least 30 years.

It’s anybody’s guess if we can ever recover from this. For instance, when Obasanjo came to power in 1999, Nigeria generated over 3,000 megawatts of electricity. His government actually spent billions of naira to reverse this to about a thousand megawatts today! Our roads are in a worse state than they have ever been since independence. Security is at its lowest ebb. And poverty now prowls proudly and menacingly in most homes to the delight of Obasanjo and his slew of sinister crooks who call themselves “reformers.”

For eight years, a thieving, hypocritical, and incompetent cabal has held our country hostage, viciously raped our resources, traumatized our people, pillaged our patrimony, and murdered our dreams in the name of democracy.

And this same baleful, felonious cabal is entrenching institutional structures to guarantee the intergenerational perpetuation of their criminality and the exclusion of other segments of the society through systematic, state-sponsored vote rigging.

Ordinary Nigerians are cruelly denied even the most basic guarantee of liberal democracy: periodic leadership change through the ballot. Last Saturday, Obasanjo and his gang of criminals in government once again manipulated the governorship and state houses of assembly elections and denied us even the luxury to dream about the future of our country.

The Independent National Electoral Commission, which is anything but independent, announced predetermined election results. Now there is outrage and violence everywhere—and justifiably so. We all know that this Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly elections have already been preset even before they have taken place. Why should anybody go out to vote? For good reason, Nigerians are progressively losing faith in the electoral process and, in fact, in democracy itself.

What is worse, perhaps, is that billions that should have been used to fix our decaying infrastructure and institute basic economic liberties for the masses of our people are being expended on these fraudulent elections. And the last thing on the minds of the beneficiaries of this fraud is the common good of the country. Democracy, for many of them, is merely a gateway for easy personal enrichment.

When I think about this, I can’t help wondering sometimes whether we really need this democracy at this stage of our development. It’s a wasteful, inept system that throws up all kinds of mediocre characters and wily murderers in power. It has become a system that only expands the stealing and killing fields.

Think of the president and his numberless coterie of redundant and unproductive assistants, advisers and hangers-on. Ditto the vice president and the ministers. This thriftlessness is replicated at the state and local government levels. Then you have the absolutely otiose legislators at all levels of government with their strings of even more otiose aides, assistants, advisers and so on, all sustained by scarce national resources that should be invested in education, infrastructural development, agriculture, welfare programs, etc.

And then think of the needless deaths and destruction that accompany all elections. Even our president defined elections as a “do or die” affair. In reality, however, it’s a do AND die affair!

The truth is that democracy, all over the world, has never been the cause of prosperity; it’s always the consequence of prosperity. The United States, Britain, and all other Western countries did not become prosperous because they were democratic; they became democratic after they were prosperous.

Recent examples can be found in the so-called Asian Tigers. The current wave of democratization in the region was preceded by what has been called “developmental dictatorship.”

I know my critique of democracy exposes me to charges of advocating the return of the military. But that’s not my point. I will be the last person to advocate that, even though I believe in my heart that what we currently have is not in any way superior to military absolutism.

If the present system had the capacity to invest Nigerians with the power to change leadership through the ballot box, I would be willing to concede that the system at least has a redeeming feature. But that’s not the case. Like in the military era, we are stuck with the same visionless, unpatriotic, and larcenous cabal, however much we may hate their rotten guts.

Some people think what we need is a patriotic, transaction-oriented, incorruptible, and developmental vanguard of leaders in the mold of a Muhammadu Buhari of old, or a Murtala Muhammed, or even a Ghadaffi.

But this suggestion is fraught with many problems and contradictions. Who will that person be in the Nigeria of today? And, worst still, how will he or she emerge? Through the electoral process that has already been hijacked by Obasanjo and his cronies? Just how?

I honestly don’t know. These are just the rambling discursive gymnastics of a tormented and frustrated deterritorialized mind. But I feel an emotionally purging sensation after writing this.

Postscript

First published in Weekly Trust of June 8, 2013

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Between Useless and Useful Tautologies in English (I)

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

The inspiration for this week’s column is supplied by a discussion that was started some weeks ago by a member of my Facebook fan club. The member wanted to know if tautologies, that is, pointless repetition of words, are grammatical errors. He gave two examples of what he considered tautologies: “to quote someone verbatim” and “he was my former student.”

 He thought “to quote verbatim” is tautologous because to “quote” is—or is supposed to be— to repeat something exactly as it is said, and “verbatim” is synonymous with “word for word.” The sentence “he was my former student” can also be said be tautologous because both “was” and “former” perform the same function in the sentence: show that the "student" in the sentence is no longer the writer’s student.

In my preliminary contribution to the discussion, I pointed out that English has two kinds of tautologies: socially favored tautologies and socially disfavored tautologies. That was my inflated way of saying there are useless tautologies and there are useful tautologies in English. I am aware that to talk of a “useful tautology” is a contradiction in terms since a tautology is by definition a useless repetition.

However, English, like all languages, is suffused with tautologies, which linguists call by different names. Some call them “reduplication” if they are limited to single words. (Intriguingly, the term “reduplication” is itself tautologous). Others call them “cloning” or “doubling.” Still others call them “pleonasm,” especially if they involve several words in a sentence. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin English, like many Nigerian languages, uses reduplication to create plural forms of nouns and for emphasis. Examples are “sand sand” for lots of sand, “yanfu-yanfu” for plenty, “well well” for really well, etc. English has similar reduplicatives for emphasis such so-so, bye-bye, night-night, no-no, war-war, jaw-jaw (remember Winston Churchill’s famous saying: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war"?), etc.

But English has many more nuanced, less obvious tautologies than the morphological reduplications stated above. In this week’s column I’ll distinguish between socially favored tautologies and socially disfavored tautologies—and tautologies that straddle the two extremes. But, first, I want to point out that tautologies are not necessarily grammatical errors. In fact, it is only in late modern English— which I periodize as starting from the 1800s to the present—that grammarians frown at tautologies. In old, middle, and early modern English, tautology was not only perfectly acceptable; it was a favorite stylistic indulgence of great writers. That was why William Shakespeare could write “This was the most unkindest cut of all” without offending the grammatical sensibilities of the grammar Nazis of his time—because, well, it wasn’t an error. You can also see the surviving remnants of tautologies from old English in many contemporary English idioms, some of which I identify below.

Socially favored tautologies

So what are the socially favored tautologies in English that most grammarians approve of— or at least don’t rail against? I have identified at least five types. They are pleonastic idiomatic expressions, emphatic reflexive pronouns, legal doublets and triplets, hendiadys, and tautological place names or tautonyms.

Pleonastic idiomatic expressions. There are many tautologous expressions in English that have been handed down to us from the dim and distant past and that command social prestige. You can’t change the lexical structure of such expressions however much you may resent redundancies in speech and writing.  Examples are “again and again,” “over and above,”  “above and beyond,” “come one, come all,” “one and only,” “safe haven” (a haven is a safe, protected zone), “each and every one,” “over and over again,” “close proximity,” etc.

In this category, you also have fossilized phrases that are tautologous but that native speakers use widely. The first time I heard Americans say “free gift” I was confounded.  Isn’t a gift by nature free? Who pays for a gift? Well, I later learned that the phrase became necessary because deceptive advertising often promises “gifts” on condition that the potential beneficiary fulfills certain financial obligations first. So a free gift is a gift with no hidden motives and with no strings attached.

 I’ve also heard educated native English speakers talk about “whole entire” things and wonder if “whole” has a different meaning from “entire.” Other conventional phrases that seem needlessly repetitive but that enjoy social prestige in native-speaker English varieties are “reason why” (which the Oxford English Dictionary says is perfectly correct and has been in respectable use in English since 1719), “burn down” (who burns up?), “down south” (isn’t the south by nature down?), “up north” (the north is always up), “exact same,” etc.

I was tempted to include “quote verbatim” here but hesitated because it’s actually not a tautology. In journalism, we have different kinds of quotes, among them partial quotes, redacted, polished, or cleaned quotes, and verbatim quotes. A partial quote only reproduces a few words in the exact order they are uttered by the speaker while the rest of the phrase or sentence is made up of paraphrases from the writer or broadcaster. A redacted quote is cleaned for grammatical or stylistic errors but still presented as if it were the exact words of the speaker. Most memoirs that insert quotation marks around conversations and dialogues supposedly recalled from several years back are often not verbatim; they are usually the writer’s recollections, which have no lexical fidelity to the original words being quoted. A verbatim quote is the unvarnished words of a speaker.  This is a useful distinction that shouldn’t be lost because of the need to avoid redundancies.

Similarly, to “republish verbatim” isn’t tautologous because it is possible to—and people do indeed— republish with minor or major editing.

Emphatic reflexive pronouns. Reflexive pronouns are the kinds of pronouns that are formed by the addition of the suffix “self” to pronouns. Examples are “myself,” “herself,” “himself,” “yourself,” etc. Grammarians talk of emphatic reflexive pronouns when you combine ordinary pronouns with reflexive pronouns such as “I myself,” “he himself,” “we ourselves,” “they themselves,” “you yourself,” etc. People with insufficient familiarity with the rules of English grammar mistake emphatic reflexive pronouns for tautologies at best and grammatical errors at worst. But emphatic reflexive pronouns are perfectly correct expressions that perform a vital function: they put emphasis on pronouns.

Legal doublets/ triplets. Legal doublets are pairs of words used in legalese, that is, the distinctive English usage of lawyers. Examples are “alter and change,” “terms and conditions,” “null and void,” “aid and abet,” “all and sundry,” “part and parcel,” “will and testament,” “cease and desist,” “true and correct,” “furnish and supply,” etc. Legal triplets are sets of three words that mean exactly the same thing and often co-occur in sentences. Examples are “cancel, annul and set aside,” “name, constitute and appoint,” “rest, residue and remainder,” etc.

Although many legal doublets have entered mainstream, idiomatic English usage (such as the expressions “null and void, “terms and conditions,” “part and parcel,” etc.) people who are not familiar with the stylistic singularities of legalese dismiss them as pleonastic. But lawyers defend their doublets and triplets by saying they are deliberate, emphatic expressions rather than tautologies.

Hendiadys. A hendiadys (pronounced hen-dai-adis) is stylistic device, very much like a doublet, that expresses ideas through two similar words conjoined by the word “and.” Popular English hendiadys, which are also idioms, are “in this day and age,”  “ruined and broken,” and “wrack and ruin.” These expressions appear tautologous on the surface but they achieve what linguists call semantic intensification, that is, they add more force to the meanings they convey.

Tautological place names or tautonyms. Many place names are repetitive (thus tautonyms) because they are derived from two different, mutually unintelligible languages. Most rivers in America, for instance, are named after Native American names that translate as “river” in English, such as “Mississippi River.” In Algonquian, a Native American language, Mississippi means “big river.” That means “Mississippi River” translates as “Big River River.”

 Two major examples tautonyms from Nigeria are Lake Chad and Lagos Lagoon. Chad is the corruption of tsade, a Kanuri word for lake. So when we say Lake Chad we are actually saying “Lake lake.” Similarly, “Lagos” is the Portuguese word for lakes or lagoons, meaning that “Lagos Lagoon” actually means “lagoon lagoon." But these tautonyms are entirely defensible because they help us achieve clarity.

To be concluded next week

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Politics of Grammar Column

Re: The Malcolm Xian Logic in Jonathan’s Praiseworthy Boko Haram Offensive

I wanted to write on the brazen, daylight electoral robbery committed “pro-Jonathan governors” during the last Nigerian Governors’ Forum chairmanship election but wasn’t able to summon sufficient emotional strength to do so. Nothing has shaken my faith in Nigeria in recent time as much as the video of the election that has now gone viral in Nigerian cyberspace.  It’s now official: Nigeria practices what some people have appropriately termed “rigocracy.”

I would probably write about this next week when I overcome my profound disillusionment, but I want to leave you with some of the responses I got to my article with the above title.

"Freedom from the consequences of our action can encourage a repeat of the action." This quote says it all. That is why the almighty Himself prescribed reward and punishment. I have always said that force has not failed in fighting Boko Haram; it is suboptimal force that has failed. If only people in the north do not let their antagonism towards the Jonathan presidency to always influence their thoughts, they will judge the Boko Haram problem correctly. Now, many people interpret these kinds of statements that I make to mean that I'm against antagonising the president. Far from it, because I antagonise him, too. I'm just saying that such antagonism should not influence how we see Boko Haram.

Dr. Raji Bello, Abuja

 I always enjoy reading your articles and have great respect for your views, but I am afraid I have to disagree with most of what you said on this one. I think the analogy to Malcolm X days that you portrayed is misplaced. The two scenarios are completely different. The enemy here is not easily identifiable unlike the white supremacist KKK. The BH are virtually blended into the society, and we all know the way and manner our forces will handle the situation. It will just be another Odi, Zaki Biam and Baga, and as you rightly pointed in your last paragraph, “the Nigerian military’s scorched earth policy may not spare innocent civilian populations in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe—as happened in Baga”. While I don’t subscribe to wholesale amnesty (and as pointed out by Mr President himself that you cannot dialogue with faceless individuals), my belief is that intelligence gathering should be given more priority rather than this show of force that may end up antagonizing the general public that they are seeking to protect.

Ibrahim Gashash, Nairobi, Kenya

You have spoken the pure truth; on this count, the president deserves kudos. There is no other reasonable way of dealing with this calamitous madness wrought by the Boko Haram. Reports reaching me from a colleague who recently left Maiduguri for Makurdi show that the government seems to be serious this time about defeating Boko Haram. The president had contacted and secured the commitment of neigbouring countries to the war against the terrorists some of whom have been apprehended when they crossed into those countries in the face of the JTF onslaught. Amnesty, forgiveness or whatever should come after military defeat. The situation had become so bad that LG employees could not go to their offices in northern Borno because anybody holding an ID card is a sure target for cold-blooded murder by BH. The Meccans who had persecuted the Prophet (PBUH) were forgiven after the latter had conquered Mecca. He was reported to have said, “The best form of forgiveness is the one you grant when you have the upper hand" (Al'afwu 'indal maqdirah). The Meccans knew the Prophet's character very well; so when he asked them of their expectations, they all chorused "forgiveness".

Abdulrahman Muhammad, India

You are not an advocate of violence. We all know that, and you know what the JTF is capable of; you wrote about what they did in Baga. Now they have a license. They won't be any different.                            There are 36 states plus the FCT, so we can sacrifice three to save the rest.  That is what this is all about. I cannot trust the JTF anymore than I can trust the enemy. By the way, the only clear distinction between the government forces and Boko Haram when it comes to violence is that the former wears a uniform and are paid from the coffers of the tax payers.

Hussaina Umar, Sokoto

I have always enjoyed your articles. They are usually concise, comprehensive, expository, and clear people’s confusion.  As for the amnesty talks, I'm in support of your position because it’s very ridiculous to dialogue with terrorists or "ghosts" as they are fondly referred to by Mr President. These are set of sects that have not proclaimed what their grievances are. Some reports say that Boko Haram wants the President to resign; some say he should convert to Islam.

Another thing I noticed is the presence of deception or ambiguity in the amnesty talks. Shehu Sani withdrew from the committee. And just as Bala Muhammed wrote in his leadership column, State of Emergency minus amnesty equals nothing. My opinion is: let both parties be plain and avoid deception. Politics and sentiments should be kept aside in dealing with such a great predicament. JTF should avoid the violation of human rights and killing of innocent people e.g. the Baga massacre.

Muhd El-Bonga Ibraheem, Abuja

 Related Article:

The Malcolm Xian Logic in Jonathan's Praiseworthy Boko Haram Offensive

Kperogi: The Man Who Redefined Grammar Column Writing in Nigeria

A Nigerian blogger by the name of Suraj Tunji Oyewale recently had an interview with me on my writing. See below his lavishly kind introduction and the link to the interview:

"Grammar column writing did not start with him; in fact, this specialization is almost as old as newspaper column writing itself. But not a few people will agree that Dr. Farooq Kperogi, Kwara-born, US-based Assistant Professor of Journalism and Citizen Media at Kennesaw State University, redefined that branch of columnism in Nigeria.

I grew up reading ‘Mind Your Grammar’ columns in Nigerian newspapers, but while other writers focus on correcting grammatical errors in newspapers’ publications, Dr. Kperogi goes beyond that traditional approach. This is why you see him write articles like ‘When Food and Grammar Mix’, ‘Top 50 Words Nigerians Commonly Mispronounce’, ‘ Why is Sentiments Such a Bad Word in Nigeria?’, ’10 Most Annoying Nigerian Media English Expressions’, ‘In Defense of Flashing and other Nigerianisms’, ‘Top Election-Related Grammatical Errors in Nigerian English’ etc. That Dr. Kperogi has introduced uncommon creativity to grammar column writing is not in doubt.

What’s more, Dr. Kperogi’s social media savviness has also meant his articles travel beyond the conventional newspapers pages and websites to Facebook, Twitter, online discussion forums and blogging platforms. He is perhaps the first name that comes to mind when grammar column writing is mentioned among millions of cyberians (Nigerians – at home and in diaspora – on the cyberspace), a term Dr. Kperogi coined.

But how did he carve such an enviable niche for himself within a short period of time? Suraj Oyewale, Jarushub’s editor, got him answer this and other questions:"

To read the full interview titled "Kperogi: The Man Who Redefined Grammar Column Writing in Nigeria," click this link here.

Raw Video of How Nigerian Governors Voted

This is embarrassing! I lost hope in the capacity for Nigeria to be truly democratic. In this video, we clearly see that Governor Amaechi won 19 out of 35 votes and Governor Jang won 16 out of 35 votes. Yet Governor Jang was declared winner. People who can rig an election that involved only 35 people under one roof have no credibility to organize ANY election.

The Malcolm Xian Logic in Jonathan’s Praiseworthy Boko Haram Offensive

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

I memorized almost all of Malcolm X’s speeches when I was an undergraduate at the Bayero University in Kano. You may disagree with the man’s philosophy (and I disagree with many) but you can’t resist being a sucker for his irresistibly brilliant witticisms, his spellbinding oratorical genius, his folksy yet profound insights, and his ornately phrased rhetorical counterpunches during debates.

When I read that President Goodluck Jonathan had declared a state of emergency in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states and instructed the military to frontally confront the vicious Boko Haram terrorists that have made life a living hell for the masses of our people in northern Nigeria, I couldn’t help recalling a powerful Malcolm X speech I memorized 20 years ago. 

Malcolm X in Ghana

On February 14, 1965 in Detroit, Michigan, Malcolm X addressed a crowd of supporters about the ironic communicative and dialogic utility of retaliatory violence. He was talking about the best way to confront the persistent violence of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist, negrophobic group that used terrorist tactics (including lynching and other kinds of extra-judicial murders) to intimidate and overawe American blacks. During the speech, he said:

“You can't ever reach a man if you don't speak his language. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can't come to him with peace. Why, good night! He'll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can't speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can't communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out what does this man speak. And once you know his language, learn how to speak his language, and he'll get the point. There'll be some dialogue, some communication, and some understanding will be developed.

“You've been in this country long enough to know the language the Klan speaks. They only know one language. And what you and I have to start doing in 1965—I mean that's what you have to do, because most of us have already been doing it—is start learning a new language. Learn the language that they understand. And then when they come up on our doorstep to talk, we can talk. And they will get the point. There'll be a dialogue, there'll be some communication, and I'm quite certain there will then be some understanding.”

Now, I am NOT an advocate of violence. I have never held a real gun in my entire life and probably never will. I am a pacifist, but I’m not a naïve, simple-minded pacifist. I know that the only language Boko Haram terrorists speak and understand is the language of violence, and you can’t speak or dialogue with them with the language of peace. There will be a communication breakdown—the kind that will result if you speak Mandarin Chinese to a farmer in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Retaliatory violence doesn’t always eliminate violence, but it sometimes provides a, if not the, basis for the negotiation of the cessation of violence. That’s why Gandhi’s oft-quoted aphorism that “an eye for an eye will only leave the whole world blind” is not entirely accurate. It unduly pampers the aggressor, unfairly restrains the victim, and defeats the logic of proportionality of justice.  A potential eye “plucker” may hold himself in check if he discovers that one eye “plucker” nearby has had his own eye plucked in retaliation. Freedom from the consequences of our action can encourage a repeat of the action.

That is why this whole proposal to grant “amnesty” to Boko Haram was wrongheaded from the beginning. Boko Haram predictably rejected it because it thought it had the upper hand in a balance of terror with government security forces. As Zainab Usman, the incredibly smart and perceptive Oxford University PhD student, noted on her blog in the wake of Boko Haram’s rejection of government’s amnesty offer, you can’t legitimately offer forgiveness to a man who has—or thinks he has—an upper hand in a confrontation with you. 

“This phase of the Boko Haram insurgency against the Nigerian state and the offer of amnesty by the government is analogous to two people, Mr. A. and Mr. B., engaged in bloody physical combat with Mr. A gaining the upper hand against Mr. B. Upon realising how imminent his defeat is, Mr. B. proclaims in between steely punches smashing his face ‘I forgive you Mr. A., I grant you amnesty.’ Of course at this point, Mr. A will realise how powerful he has become, and simply finish off Mr. B.,” Zainab wrote.

The logic that flows from Zainab’s unassailable analogy is that the federal government should first militarily subdue Boko Haram before it would be in a position to offer it amnesty. To paraphrase Malcolm X, the Nigerian state has to understand and speak the language of Boko Haram. Then, there will be some dialogue, some communication, and hopefully some understanding. Although security forces had confronted Boko Haram before, the confrontations had been halfhearted, fragmentary, and ineffectual. Of course, I am not unmindful of the fact that it was the Nigerian police’s high-handedness that radicalized Boko Haram in the first place, but it also can’t be denied that the group has transmogrified from a lunatic fringe preaching strange doctrines to an insidiously malignant group that indiscriminately murders innocent men, women, and children without reason or rhyme.

That’s why, as much as detest this government, I wholeheartedly support President Jonathan’s current action against Boko Haram. But while I applaud the latest sustained offensive against Boko Haram, I worry that the Nigerian military’s scorched earth policy may not spare innocent civilian populations in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe—as happened in Baga. That would be monumentally tragic. We cannot win the war against Boko Haram if the government and its forces can’t give everyday, innocent civilian populations caught in the labyrinth of Boko Haram’s confusion a clear distinction between Boko Haram and government security forces.

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