It has become a tradition, and severally mouthed by the educated and the not too educated persons, and promoted by the media- the print and electronic, as we struggle to make ourselves clearer and to be understood in communicating our ideas and opinions to the listening and reading audiences. The expressions “Lots, Lots of, A whole lot” have been thoroughly and roundly abused that they are rendered useless and ineffective in today’s English- spoken and written. The media as I said (not like I said, to quote most of our commentators on Radio and Television) in the beginning, are guilty of promoting some of these absurdities to the annoyance of the English purists and masters.
They do not appear to relent in feeding the public with the wrong words and phrases. But the English pragmatics are not giving up either, encouraging our writers, journalists and reporters to do the right thing remains our business. So, do not take offence if you are the one involved here. Keep yourself updated through research, and read wide. Do not get stuck, free yourself of mental laziness and blossom beyond your imagination. Back to our business of the day! The expressions “Lots, Lots of, A whole lot” are dysfunctional and weak, so much that they have lost their bite. Ignore them and look for better and functional replacements to avoid sounding boring. It all boils down to making deliberate effort to break away from the old order and embrace the new.
Now, take a closer look at these expressions and you will agree with me that the language is not cast in gold, or that it has some scientific and fixed methods of expressing oneself. Not at all, and that is why we have at our disposal reference materials, in their various forms and styles, to build on our vocabularies. The ones that readily comes to mind are books on synonyms. They are quite helpful and I encourage those whose English is a second language to go for them. The English pragmatics have given us these options to work with and sound good. Here we go; instead of recycling the old phrases “Lots, Lots of, A whole lot,” we can simply do with expressions such as “many, much, a great deal” and so on.
Try it today and see how far you can go. The issue here is, to avoid sounding repetitive when we are tempted to speak or write on things that bothers us. The media should be proactive by minding the way they write and speak the language because they either positively or negatively influence the listening or reading publics. The media is said to be a strong force in social engineering and cohesion. People trust and rely on the media for information, education and entertainment, and so are indirectly or unconsciously bound to imitate what they see and hear from the different channels of communication. Try it yourself; make sentences with the following words and expression. “Many, Much, or a great deal” and shun the over recycled phrases “Lots, Lots of, A whole lot” and experience something different.
