Sheng: Another Malady Ailing Us?

Long time without an article; blame that on the intellectual assessment I was undergoing for the last two weeks in a form we all don’t like however endowed we are (read exams), anyway how about we speak about Sheng today?

This is a difficult one I must admit! It’s the kind of subject that takes me too long to begin working on, wondering from which side I should start. For a kick start, we must note that a good number of Kenyans will struggle a lot to construct a grammatically correct sentence in English as well as in Kiswahili, the two official languages. Tragic, right? Let us not even talk about vernacular languages and the urban youth!

Sheng has over time gained legitimacy and wide acceptance even from the f expected quarters while the opprobrium to which it had been subjected may have reduced. Besides it has spread beyond Nairobi and is now commonly used in many urban set ups around the country. In a country where language is considered to be a means of identity, thus sometimes our names betray us at times, sheng may be seen as a unifying language. But who does it bring together, different communities? I bet not. The youth? May be! Why am I skeptic about sheng, you realize the rich and the poor have their own varieties, in fact there is another entity called Engsh. Sheng doesn’t achieve to unite communities and to some extent even the youth. Your ethnicity isn’t measured by how well you can speak your mother tongue but by where your ancestors hail from! Sheng only has with it the possibility of unifying people simply because it gives users a contemporary identity unlike standard language. Most new words in Sheng erupt from Kenyan slums and “low class estates,” creating a barrier between the upper class youth of the upper class and those of the lower class. We would be therefore justified o conclude that apart from failing to provide a panacea of negative ethnicity and bridge the gap by creating a common identity, sheng creates another gap between the rich and the poor! After all, how could such a hogwash language without an identity itself give people an identity?

For those of us who practice the noble profession, teaching and those who sit in interview panels, we know sheng could just be another malady ailing our youth. It pains to see someone garner a mere 10 out of 40 in a primary school composition, or worse still the ever dwindling language grades in English and Swahili that the Education minister will announce year in year out, announcing the K.C.S.E results. Just like how much your grooming says about you, or better still your hair style, so does the language you use. From the school of thought that boys (not men) who wear stud earrings need an urgent visit to Mathari mental hospital, I need not mention how one appears to be when they use sheng at the wrong place at the wrong time for the right purpose. The pervasive use of sheng should be curbed so that it can stop inhibiting the comprehension of other languages.

Ghetto radio boasts to be the only sheng station in Kenya saying “your official sheng station” in English. They couldn’t use sheng to communicate such a simple message in their slogan. That is how unintelligible sheng is owing to its dynamism and constant metamorphosing. Just when you thought you knew something in sheng, you are already using archaic words. Sheng lacks its own lexicon and can only be used in limited contexts. Try listening to Ghetto Radio Sheng news and listen to how the presenter struggles to force some words to fit.

Sheng is a mishmash of different languages principally Swahili, English, Gikuyu and Dholuo. Its use has had far reaching effects on other languages and can only be comprehended by a few. Sheng is still a cryptolect, in every sense of the word.

Sheng is only good to that artist who’s making a kill out of every album he releases, its only good for that politician who wants to make an appeal to the youth, and lie that he has their interests at heart, its only good for that entity putting mega billboards in peri-urban areas! Otherwise it can be vile, repugnant and can degrade you to look uncouth. Avoid using it by all means, if you have to, toe the line of the grounds into which you shouldn’t carry along this blemish.

Not even the Official Sheng Station Uses Sheng on its Advertisement Banners

MIND YOUR PUNCTUATION

In our quest for short  messages and instant replies we have atrociously violated language. But before getting there we had begun with ignoring all punctuation rules. In this day and age when people almost everyone is involved in microblogging and a good number of people are now writing on their own blogs, grammar and punctuation mistakes have become more rampant. The worst part is that we carry them on to where they should never appear; which makes me think that we should just stick to the rules everywhere, isn’t that what makes the language beautiful? The importance of correct punctuation cannot be overemphasized. Punctuation is what makes the reader hear the writer’s voice. It carries with it clarity, tone and even the message itself.

One of the most blatantly misused of punctuation marks is the comma. This blog post is not enough to state the instances where the comma is abused. I would have to type my fingers sore if I were to write the many situations in which the comma is misused and where it is supposed to be used. Most of the time we aren’t aware that we are misusing the comma, we just do it unconsciously. Sometimes there’s just that irresistible urge to litter your sentences with commas since you think they are too long. Wrongly placed commas can be hilarious while lack of commas can be grave. You can entirely change the meaning by wrongly placing a comma or omitting one.

omitting a comma can cost someone's life! 

Used to play around with meaning, quotation marks have indiscriminately proliferated in all sorts of texts. Quotation marks are unique in their own way; they are the only quotation marks that are used in literary styles to produce sarcasm, they will provoke you to think more about the connotative meaning of the quoted word. The apostrophe hasn’t been spared either in as much as it’s its use is the easiest to master after the full stop. Apostrophes are only used to show possession and in contractions. However you have to master the exception, its, in possessive form does not have an apostrophe, it’s, with an apostrophe is the contraction of it is. In that light ‘til cannot be used to mean until and when you write the 70’s you mean something belongs to 70 or perhaps ‘70s as in 1970-1079. Pluralizing family name doesn’t require an apostrophe lest you need to show that something belongs to them. For words ending with an s the apostrophe to show possession comes after the s, including plural nouns.

Someone call apostrophe police!

We all like putting several exclamation marks after a statement or a word to emphasize the gravity of the matter or maybe anything else. This may be excusable in sms and social media but still, overuse of exclamation marks leaves one wondering what exactly is being emphasized, I visualize it as someone just shouting around. Likewise in ellipses only three dots (…) should be used and not four. As far as punctuation is concerned, this is just a tip of the iceberg, we haven’t mentioned hyphenation, capitalization and dashes.

Proper Punctuation matters

We are in a generation that knows colons as tools of making an emoticon and can only appear in L or J and semi colons are only used to wink ;-) accompanied by a message which has no sense of grammar or sometimes meaningless to intellectual minds. Given that using the two may be tricky, it is better to leave them out than use the wrongly. However it doesn’t break a bone to remember a simple rule a put by grammarly, one of the most popular grammar blogs. The rule is: “A colon should not separate a noun from its verb, a verb from its object or subject complement, a preposition from its object, nor a subject from its predicate.” Am starting to feel that my text here has too many commas. Moreover I know a class six lesson, on a blog post is not your cup of tea, how often do we even write apart from school work and who even marks your poorly punctuated Facebook status updates and tweets. So it’s only fair I stop at his point but remember; good punctuation is beautiful, lack of punctuation marks is harrowing and misuse of punctuation marks is awful. 

MALICE, MALEVOLENCE & ANARCHY

School term is finally over, those of us practicing the noble profession through which professionals for other careers are churned out know how hectic last week was, with exams and marking! I am surprised primary school kids are writing better compositions than so many secondary school students. My heart now bleeds for that teenager who can barely construct a correct sentence in correct English nor Kiswahili sanifu.

We know too well where the rain started beating, social media!  The impacts of social media on language are far reaching. Like a cancerous malignancy, our wanton language use on social media has not spared any vital organ of the English language from the syntax to semantics! Through social media we are destroying the concrete on which writers base their great works of art we all enjoy to read. So serious is the problem that at my age I can no longer decipher what some of my friends are trying to say in text messages, hangouts, tweeter and Facebook.

I can bet that whoever came up with the idea of a 140 character limit wanted to ensure that there is fun in sending clear and concise tweets, without rambling on or being verbose. What have we done instead? We have taken advantage of the situation, we have shamelessly wrecked grammar, and we have reduced ourselves into a throng of simpletons committing all sorts of atrocities against the queen’s dialect. You may describe language as liquid or dynamic prone to change anytime. This change might be anytime but not anyhow. As a student of linguistics I appreciate this; indeed all languages do change but some of the changes in question are just unjustifiable and uncalled for.

Vowels have suddenly been rendered useless! How do you omit all the vowels of a word? Doesn’t your conscience tell you something isn’t right? You are about to tell me it’s because you want to maximize on your 140 characters, right? What about those who substitute i with y, like in phylosophy? Thanks to social media, a good number of students and young professionals can no longer spell simple words even in academic and formal writing. Even with the ubiquitous presence of spell checks and auto corrects in our devices which are apparently smarter than the users, we still force these mistakes into all our writings.

I am told that  preceded by a hashtag has a new meaning apart from being successful while two strange bed fellows, epic and fail have been married! Such profligacy with language is illicit! The two nations to which English can be said to be native are commonly referred to by their acronyms. The same acronymy has now boomeranged on language, clearly lol and omg were just an indication of danger that was looming. Today I see whole sentences reduced into an acronym, needless to say I no longer bother to discern what the person is trying to say! Worse still these have been also adopted into normal parlance so that when someone is late for class and the no nonsense professor needs an explanation, the first thing one says is OMG! Such people should thank God am not their professor! I now understand why my friends are confused by their BFs, GFs, BFFs, FWBs and any others I might have forgotten. Words have been fragmented in the guise of shortening in such a way that they are no longer intelligible. Others have just been deliberately spelt wrongly for no particular reason, that’s how serious the escalation of anarchy and impunity has become in the use of English. I am yet to find the correct words to describe dolts who are x instead of s and k as a reply that means okay, if I guessed right.

Language:Stop this madness

As I confess having committed some of these heinous crimes against language, I must mention that for quite some time now I have completely exonerated myself from such barbarisms as the use of moronic and mutant lexical units with no semantic bearing. Every time I witness this idiocy, read a vapid colloquial, every time I receive vowel-less word-husks in a text message, I wonder what our successors will make of the troglodytes we are, who will(by then) have irreparably polluted the beauty of the English language! Clearly social media is a bitter pill to swallow, sociologists will tell you there is more to worry about other than language. As you embrace this mutant and unintelligible language; netspeak, fingered speech, chat speech or whatever other name it has been baptised, take caution lest it boomerangs on you. But before you get there be sure to open those two links (I cannot overemphasize how factual the information there is!). The English language is desperate for justice! The only way tou can dispense justice is by following grammar and spelling rules.  Otherwise I hope I will not have a BFF soon, Best Friends Funeral; apana! 

Homonymy: The Spelling Monster

Earlier this week when flipping through a standard 6 pupils report form I came across something that shocked me in some way, something poorer than the pupils performance; the teacher of English who also happened to be the class teacher had noted, “David you need to pay more effort expesially in science!” If you haven’t noted the mistake in the sentence I suggest you either restart reading or just quit! I understood why our English is terrible. If a teacher could make as a grave mistake as that one, how many others has he transmitted to you. Apart from mother tongue interference, there’s one other monster in written language: homonymy. Homonymy consists of two: homographs which refers to words that are spelt the same but have different meanings and the notorious homophones! Like the suffix phone suggests, homophones have to do with talking, hearing and listening just like in telephone. These are words that sound the same or almost the same, more often the latter than the former. This is a nightmare for many non-native speakers of the English language. Here are a few of the most tricky pairs:

1.       Hear/here: one of them being among the 5 senses, mistaking the two is unforgivable. Can you hear me? Come over here! I don’t think I should explain what each means but can please show that you know the difference in your writing.

2.       Heard/had: we aren’t done with hear yet. You heard me, didn’t you? Here comes hear reincarnated in its past form. Heard is the past of hear while had is the past tense and participle of have. Again, show you know this in your writing.

3.       Definitely/Definately: the former is the correct while the latter is the misspelt form!

4.       Sight/site: site has everything to do with seeing (5 senses again) while site refers to physical location or website. What happens when it comes to writing that you suddenly decide they are interchangeable?

5.       Its/it’s: which is the possessive and which is the contraction of it is? Ask any grammar teacher how many time they have had to repeat this in class. Its is the possessive to mean belonging to something.

6.       There/their: their parents were there/there parents were there? A mistake one shouldn't be forgiven for!

7.       Principal/principle: their principal emphasized on the principle of generosity. This is one of the most mischievous, always putting to test one’s spelling. I think my example is clear enough to distinguish one from the other.

8.       Lose/loose: loose is what happens to your jeans when you lose a lot of weight. I am sure you know this but somehow you’ll always make this mistake once you put pen to paper!

9.       Breathe/breath: doing some work that you want to be error free and then find you have to use one of the two things get bumpy. To make matters worse you don’t have a dictionary to help you distinguish which is the verb and which is the noun. Paraphrasing won’t help. Worry no more, just master that the verb has an e at the end, so that if you breathe you have taken a breath! J

10.   Too/two/to: need I say anything about these?

right, rite or write?

I just listed ten, I could have listed even 50 but the list is endless. With most of these not even Microsoft grammar check will save you, if anything it might correct where you were right and give you a wrong alternative. You just have to be keen. It doesn’t understand meanings but you do. I found it somewhat pointless to keep writing the meanings because that’s not where the problem lies. And* we didn’t find a solution for our English teacher with his expesially, that wasn’t precipitated by homonymy!