Forcible Entrance

Sample 1: “According to sources the assassins forcibly forced their way into the man’s house, located at the Shuwari Ward area of the town…”(20 Feared Dead As Gunmen Sack Police Station, Prison in Adamawa,( The Nation, Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012)

I urge readers to pay attention to the clause, “the assassins forcibly forced their way into the man’s house.” The phrase of special interest is forcibly forced. It shouldn’t require any intellectual labour on the part of any intelligent reader to realize that here is a clear case of verbal redundancy. Is it not more than obvious that the adverb forcibly is another form of the verb forced? If my memory serves me well, I should think that verbiage is one of the cardinal sins in journalism. A good writer should be sensitive to how words collocate—how they cluster in particular contexts, prefering one union or companion to the other. As the first reader of his own words, a writer should cultivate the discipline and habit of yanking out the verbal weeds from the precious wheat. To be sure, there can’t be a perfect verbal craft, but puerile flaws can be nauseating and therefore intolerable.

No doubt, either forcibly or forced should go: “the assassins forcibly entered into the man’s house” or “the assassins forced their way into the man’s house.”

Sample 2: “We would have abandoned this but the more we tried, the more it became sronger and stronger and honestly. . .It would be recalled that Ademinokun and his enstranged wife, beautiful actress, Doris Simeon ceased to be husband and wife last year”( Between Stella Damascus and Daniel Ademinokun, the Saturday Sun, 29 Dec., 2012)

One word that suffers a major distortion is enstranged which occurs in the phrase, “his enstranged wife.” We have used the word “major” advisedly even though, as we are going to see shortly, the inadvertent falsification is a function of nothing more than a single letter. There is nothing new in observing that the English orthography arbitrarily represents words and their meanings. It is paradoxical that while users across the globe grumble about this idiosyncratic representation of words and meaning by the orthographic system, there seems to be a consensus that one of the best ways to measure people’s literacy level is their ability to spell correctly.

The word under scrutiny, don’t let us forget, is enstranged. Let’s pay attention to the segment en, an element that looks very much like a prefix intended to change or modify the meaning of what resembles a root word, strange. The speculation here about the reporter’s idea of the morphology of the word enstranged is not unfounded in view of the existence of such morphological relationships as en and courage (encourage), en and large (enlarge), en and rich (enrich), en and feeble (enfeeble), en and noble (ennoble), en and able (enable), en and danger (endanger), en and sure (ensure), etc. Relying on this productive morphorlogical pattern, the reporter has produced the morpheme en, if a morpheme it might be called. Actually, to be fair to the reporter, the only part of the “prefix” that emanates from him is the letter n. But it is a bad error all the same!

While it is true that the form enstranged closely resembles the English word, estranged, the former (enstranged) actually does not exist in English, being a strange creation wrought through the ignorant insertion of the letter n, an error that probably originates as a pronunciation deficiency. The legitimate English word, it bears repeating, is estranged.

The distorting intrusive n responsible for that strange lexical item is also in evidence in the form expantiate, a distorted version of the word expatiate. Of course to expatiate is to give details, to discuss an issue fully. The impression created by those who habitually introduce the intrusive letter is that the form expantiate, their own version of expatiate, is indebted to the forms expand and expansion. There is absolutely no connection between the word expatiate, on the one hand, and expand and expansion on the other. The interesting fact is that some Nigerians have this habit of over-projecting some rules, over-generalising some observable patterns. At any rate, the legitimate word is expatiate(and not expantiate).

Still on this excerpt, we examine the structure, ’’the more we tried, the more it became stronger and stronger.”  We are interested in the relationship between the word more and the morpheme er in the word stronger. Both of them mediate comparison, but since they mean the same thing, only one of them can be used in one and the same context. Actually, some words cannot have the suffix er attached to them; instead, the word more is brought into collocation with them. Whichever is applicable, the same grammatical function is in operation.

For example, you cannot say, “My house is more bigger than yours.” That’s a kind of double comparison. Since the word big normally takes the er suffix, we should exclude the word more from the context so that we have, “My house is bigger than yours.” The problem with the structure under examination is that we have both the word more and the suffix er in the same context.

A better version of the structure should read: “the more we tried, the stronger and stronger it became.”

Sample 3:”The fnal resting place for former National Security Adviser (NSA), General Andrew Azazi, who died in a helicopter crash, is now shrouded in controversy, with elders, chiefs, and youths of his oil rich Peretorugbene community in Bayelsa State, have cautioned against his burial in Yenagoa.”(Azazi’s Burial in Yenagoa Will Spell Doom—Family, Community Warn, the Saturday Sun,Dec. 29, 2012).

The syntax of the reportorial sentence has been incompetently managed. The segment requiring attention is “with elders, chiefs…Bayelsa State have cautioned against his burial in Yenagoa.” The point at which the syntax goes awry is the perfect tense, have cautioned. The perfect tense construction is incompatible with the the prepositional phrase which opens with the particle, with. There are two possible ways of adjusting the structure. We could retain the prepositional phrase which begins with the particle with and change the perfect tense construction to a present or ing participle: “with elders, chiefs. . .Bayelsa State cautioning against his burial in Yenagoa.” Or we could delete the particle with and replace it with the conjunction and. With this adjustment we are free to retain the perfect tense construction: “and elders, chiefs. . .Bayelsa State have cautioned against his burial in Yenagoa.”

Sample 4: “Speaking at the event, held in his Word of Life Bible Church, Warri, Oritsejafor said the development was a major step towards uniting Christians and Muslims and restore peace to every part of the country.”(Oritsejafor, Muslim Leader Exchange Bible, Quran, Preach Peace, the Sunday Vanguard, Dec. 2012)

I draw readers’ attention to the structure, “a major step towards uniting Christians and Muslims and restore peace to every part of the country.”Please let us note the gerund uniting following the preposition towards directly. Actually, it is the preposition towards that attracts the gerund uniting to the context. Now consider the verb restore directly preceding the noun peace. The fact is that the word restore stands in the same relation to the preposition towards that the gerund uniting stands to that preposition.It stands to reason, therefore, that the word restore should be a gerund as well. That portion of the excerpt should read: “a major step towards uniting Christians and Muslims andrestoring peace to every part of the country.”

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