Business management and drainage facilities

SAMPLE 1: “Ensuring the smoothing running of an enterprise has its own challenges. Often times, management of businesses are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea when it comes to applying rules to deal with erring staff, especially those considered to be key to the business.”(My Best Business Decisions Challenge Status Quo, The Nation, Sunday, August 13, 2017)

Let’s pay attention to the verb-form, are, which occurs in the following context: “management of businesses are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.” Clearly, this verb (are) is in its plural form, if my knowledge of the English grammar is not fundamentally flawed. To what plural noun does this verb-form owe its plurality? In other words, how does the reporter come to the decision to make the verb plural? What is the noun that supposedly influences this contextual grammatical orientation?

The noun businesses occurring immediately before the verb-slot could have provided the inspiration for this choice. This is because that noun is plural. However, this is a wrong source of influence because, although the noun is plural and the closest one to the verb-slot, it bears no logical and grammatical relationship to the verb-slot.

The reporter’s choice would be accurate if the structure were of the form: “businesses are caught…” But the structure is larger than that and offers different grammatical dynamics. The structure under consideration is: “managementof businesses are caught…”( and NOT: “businessesare caught”). It should be clear that the relevant noun as far as concord is concerned is management, a noun that is unmistakably singular, again if my grammar is not fundamentally deficient. In the light of this grammatical reality, the verb should be changed to its singular form: is.

Grammatical choices should be based on sound knowledge and logic both of which are inconsistent with superficial, hasty and unreflective decisions.

Next we consider the lexemes “often times” both of which modify the sentence whose faulty concord has just engaged our attention. No doubt, both of them exist in the English lexicon. But the problem is that they are never used as we have them in the context under consideration. It is obvious that the word required by the context is oftentimes, a single word (and not two), an American colloquial version of the standard form, often. What is being suggested here is that the two words, often and times, should be brought together so that we have a single word: oftentimes.

The observations we have made in respect of oftentimes may also be made regarding the word thoroughfare, for example. There is the word thorough and there is the wordfare and there is thoroughfare. There are contexts in which thorough can be used legitimately as an autonomous lexical item; there are also contexts in which fare can be used as a lexical item in its own right; and there are suitable contexts for the word thoroughfare. It is important for users of the language to be thoroughly familiar with its orthography with all its unpredictability and illogicality.

Sample 2: “Tragedy struck early on Thursday morning when residents of Ogo-Oluwa community…woke up to discover the lifeless body of a taxi driver in a drainage under construction in their locality…The deceased taxi driver was suspected to have brought a passenger into the community late at night when his car rammed into the drainage. He was believed to have been making efforts to get the cab out of the drainage when he suddenly slipped and hit his head against the iron rod which hung out dangerously from the concrete drainage…One of them, Ishola Olapade, told our correspondent that an elderly woman died few weeks ago in Amikanle area after slipping into the drainage and hit her head against the rods and concrete. Similarly, Sunday Sun gathered that a boy equally fell into one of the drainages and died in May.”(Road Project Claims 3Lives in 2 Months, the Sunday Sun, July 30, 2017)

The word whose usage should interest readers is drainage which occurs six times in the excerpt. Here are the contexts in which the word is found: “the lifeless body of a driver in a drainage under construction”; “his car rammed into the drainage”; “making efforts to get the cab out of the drainage”; “which hung out dangerously from the concrete drainage”;“after slipping into the drainage”; “a boy equally fell into one of the drainages”.

By now, readers should have noted that the word has been used in each instance as a singular countable noun. Perhaps the clearest examples of this are to be found in the first and sixth instances of the usage: a drainage and one of the drainages. Please note that the one is modified by the indefinite article a, an unmistakable indicator of a singular countable noun; the other is modified by the partitive expression, one of, in addition to being pluralized as the final –s indicates.

This usage confusion arises, I guess, because the reporter mistakes the drainage facilities for the system or process which the word drainage properly denotes. Yes, drainage is about the system or process of making water or any other liquid flow through an appropriate channel or facility. Drainage does not refer to a structure or facility; it is an uncountable noun denoting the process or system of movement of liquid.

It should be obvious that what the reporter has in mind each time he uses the word drainage is the concrete structure, the facility, the water pathway being constructed for the drainage system.Many Nigerians frequently pluralize the word drainage. But it is an uncountable noun which, typically, should not be pluralized.

Please read the following sentences: 1) Given the poor drainage, erosion will damage this road within a short time. 2) Engineers are already thinking about ways of improving the efficiency of the drainagesystem. 3) I am not an engineer, but it should be obvious to any observer that the drainage facility is faulty. 4) I think it will be useful to construct the drainagefacility before the major construction begins. 5) Water gathers on this portion of the road because of inadequate drainage. 6) The drains seem to be blocked somewhere along the line. 7) The problem is that the drains are not big enough. 8) The drains connected to the central drainage system are either broken or blocked.

The important issue here is that the noun drainage should never be used in its plural form because it is an uncountable noun. In addition, it should not be modified by the indefinite article, a or its synonym. However, the word drain, referring to the pipe connected to the drainage system, is a countable noun and can be pluralized. For this reason, the following sentence is faulty: “The governor has given approval for the construction of more effective *drainages.” The sentence should read: “The governor has given approval for the construction of a more effective drainage structure/facility/system.”