A worrisome recurring issue, from whichever angle you look at it, is the misuse of language often openly displayed on our public and private broadcast stations, especially; though the newspapers and other print media also share in the blame of foisting on the citizens words and phrases that are regarded as taboos by the language purists and masters. The newspapers, for example, can be excused on this; misuse or misapplication of words in their daily routine of informing, educating and entertaining the publics on the latest occurrences, events and breakthroughs, but not so for the radio and television.
After all, how many people read the printed word, only a few of the educated population, the watchdog and critics of the media, concur. Of all the media channels available, the electronic media instantaneously influences the audience more. The sight and sound propagated by radio and television, added to it, the internet (think of all the dynamic and motion platforms), incite the viewer or listener to take action, especially for those who cannot draw the boundary between fake, factual, credible and believable news or stories.
The authorities should heed the call to institute programmes and embark on deliberate policies to foster media literacy and numeracy, particularly among the youthful population, who are the target of some of these misconceptions, rather than resorting to the desperate move of tracking down on journalists and writers who they suspect use the ubiquitous internet platforms to cause trouble. The backlash is, the Nigerian government is gagging the press! Defenders of free speech cry out, and reasonably so, unless the government changes its tactics and approach in dealing with the problems of fake news and hate speech.
Another angle to this noise about utilising the media to mobilise, galvanise and propel the people for positive change, is the language culture inherited from Britain, our colonial overlords. We are stuck to the Queen’s English in all spheres of our individual and collective lives or livelihoods. And so, we should care and mind the way we speak and converse on public space, made possible by the electronic media, in particular. It beats my imagination that an in-house guest on a popular radio station somewhere in Lagos could utter, what I regard as obscene phrase, “people are not much..’ on a live radio programme!
It’s an aberration taken too far, to say the least. It’s either our media schools or training grounds are producing or churning out half-baked media people or stark illiterate individuals as presenters and anchors to take over jobs that they were not adequately prepared for. These are elementary English words, “much” for uncountable nouns, such as water, sand etc., substituted for countable nouns such as people, chairs etc. One cannot rule out what the language experts refer to as peer or group pressure. All because, we hear most Nigerians mouth “much people” and the bug catches on fast, without verifying the authenticity of the un-English “much people” coinage, promoted by homegrown English ‘Nigeriana.’
Another disturbing home cultivated English is the rather over recycled cliché, “come next year…”, ” come next month..” and so on, poisonous and weak made in Nigeria expression. I did carry out extensive research to establish the truth about the “come next…” colloquialism and found none of it. The nearest to it as approved by the standard English dictionary are grammars from the verb “come.” Come by, come along, come back, come about, come across, come away, come down. You can explain them further, if you like. Quickly, before I drop the curtain. Let me again remind our presenters and anchors on radio and television, by extension any other channel of addressing the audience, that the vocabulary, ‘sy cophant’ is verbalised ‘sikofant,’ not ‘saikofant’ as made popular by some broadcast stations.
