I struggled not to deviate or transgress, not at all, from our countdown to the 50 most harassed and misused clichés in English to talk about other things as it concerns the language wildly spoken by millions, if not billions of people around the world. However, the more I set to go on with the conversation to reveal the 50 ranked words or phrases that have become stale owing to over use, someone from somewhere would suddenly draw my attention to contentious issues about the language that would warrant my instant response. Although I try as much as I could inside me to tell them to wait for some time to get my reply; but you should fathom it out yourself and understand my dilemma. If I refuse or bid my time to answer, I would certainly be called names. Either that I am snobbish or that I am careless about clarifying the seeming confusion and often, the puzzle that trail the language, especially for the learners. So, I have to yield and obey my ‘masters’ because that is the spirit behind the column, together to find solution to problems raised bordering on standards. The English purists and masters have this at the back of their minds, to solve riddles the language poses and break them down to the understanding of the average person. As I normally counsel my students- the journalist to be, media men and women are trained to ask questions.
Ask, and it shall be given to you; paraphrasing what even the Holy Scripture says. I do encourage readers, including followers of events on television and radio as they break, not just to sit back and swallow it all, but to ask critical and probing questions. One of the reasons fake or unverified news fly around is to remind us of the unwholesome act of the untrained, or what we call in journalistic parlance, the journalese, described by the dictionary as “derogatory name typical of shallow, and full of clichés, and jargon used by less able journalists”. Here is the root of the problem. People need to become media literate through training. No one is exempted, now that we parade a crop of pretentious writers claiming to be exercising the sacred but daunting role of journalists, just because they have access to smartphones to send messages uncensored though, to group chats which in most cases leaks to a wider audience. The real journalist must wake up and quench this raging fire before it consumes us all, by becoming smarter and innovative while handling the news item; report factually, objectively and timely. That brings us to the zation or sation word or statement, and if you prefer, the suffixes after the verb, “civilize” or “civilise”, for instance, living us with the noun form of it “civilization” or “civilisation”. The spelling of the phrase looks confusing, and so then the writer is compelled to use them the way he or she likes; as if there are no ground rules or standards guiding their usage.
The English pragmatists say there are exceptions to it which the writer should imbibe or learn, apply or engage them appropriately to convey the right message. Again, what the language experts assume to be the American or British English in spelling cannot be totally ignored. Aside from pronunciation of words which we noted before now, that the American speaker stresses the consonants and sounds drawl or lazy, while the English man’s or woman’s speech is distinct and clipped, easy to pick up by strangers to the language. But not so for the American man or woman, when he or she speaks one must be attentive enough to get the gist. Otherwise, one would be lost in between conversation. As I said earlier, there are exception to spellings with the zation or sation sound when articulating or pronouncing the vocabulary, “civilization” or “civilisation”, “colonization” or “colonisation” from the verbs “civilize” or “civilise”, “colonize”, or “colonise”, depending on whether one is on the side of the American English or the British English. For us Nigeria, as I often emphasise, we lean towards British English. Scrutinise our media and organs of government, be it institutions, the judiciary, private concerns, etc., the language of doing business is tailored in favour of Britain. It’s just our inherited foreign dialect; a fallout of our colonial experience. No apologies! All the same, take this home as the correct spelling without shifting from ‘z’ or ‘s’ as obtainable elsewhere when one takes into account the American English and British English. According to the purists of the language, the following spellings are absolute. One can correctly write: Nigerianization, Westernization, Northernization, Africanization, Europeanization, Americanization, Commercialization, Humanization, etc
