Hillary Clinton's nominalised adjective (among other nominalized phrases) has been widely used since my undergraduate English language courses, so I honestly find nothing new in that.
As for 'govt diktat' on national language(s) as a binding force I once mentioned several years ago on this forum the case of India's 16 (perhaps they were inspired by Esu-Elegbara seeing that they are largely polytheistic) in addition to English. I would think such a move will actually galvanize the socio-economic cohesiveness Ken speaks about rather than being the result of it.
No wonder in terms of political cohesion India in spite of its population which is ten times that of Nigeria is achieving monumental giants strides socio-economically while all Nigeria has to show is ethnic divisions and economic stagnation.
Yes English is a global language; for a Nigerian to state that it is the only language capable of binding the country together and that no indigenous language is so capable is to admit of racial inferiority complex: if we were not colonized we would not have progressed!
--In respect to farooq's comments:
It would be interesting to know how the dominant language(s) in a given culture have risen or fallen.
Some examples of my curiosity: to what extent has English replaced French in Morocco, Rwanda, and Senegal.
To what extent has French yielded to wolof in Senegal?
The notion that French had to be used in Cameroon as the national language was based on Farooq's rationalization for national identity. the glue that held disparate language speakers together. But in fact, the most widely spoken language in Cameroon in the 70s was pidgin English. I bet that is still the case.
How widely spoken is pidgin, and not standard English?
And most of all, why can't we call pidgin a separate language. Or, to be accurate, a set of separate languages since the regional differences are considerable.
Lastly, I have a strong impression that it is not government diktats that determine what language will be spoken, but rather the economic and social exchanges of the people themselves, which explains the decline in French (despite the greatest efforts of France for la francophonie), and the ascendancy of English (without the americans giving a damn); and by "English" of course I mean "American English" not British English.
Just consider the dominant music in the world today: hip hop/rap, and the notion of cultural spread not being driven by government policy should be apparent.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday 30 October 2016 at 12:43
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Folks are mixing up so many unrelated issues, and it's getting really frustrating. Before you make a point, have grounds for it. Yes, people, several people actually, have written about Donald Trump's English usage. A famous study concluded that he speaks at a Third Grade Leve (see lhttp://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-third-grader-121340). English teachers have torn apart his grammar. See, for instance, this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-bruno/donald-trump-english-teacher_b_11353444.html.
But as a rhetorician, I know Trump's mangled English isn't a product of insufficient mastery of the language. It is a deliberate rhetorical strategy designed to establish identification with the lower end of the American social stratum that constitutes the "base" of the Republican Party. In his book Language and Symbolic Power, French theorist Pierre Bourdieu calls this "strategy of condescension." Bourdieu didn't mean "condescension" in the everyday sense of the word as disdain or patronage; he meant the ability to negotiate and seamlessly traverse several "linguistic markets," as he called it. He said this ability invests people with immense social and cultural capital. As Peter Haney puts it, strategies of condescension occur "when someone at the top of a social hierarchy adopts the speech or style of those at the bottom. With such a move, the dominant actor seeks to profit from the inequality that he or she ostensibly negates."
George Bush used it to maximum effect. People still remember him as the former US president who could barely string together grammatically correct sentences in English, who spoke with a Texan drawl. But Bush is the scion of "old money" who went to elite prep schools and grew up mostly in the northeast. If he wanted to sound "polished" and "cultivated," he could, but he would risk calling attention to his privilege and thereby alienating people he wanted to appeal to.
That doesn't mean people at the upper end of the social scale don't innocently mangle the language. For instance, when Hillary Clinton recently called some Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables," American English grammarians took her on; they said "deplorable" is an adjective, not a noun, and therefore can't be pluralized as "deplorables" since only nouns are pluralized. But "deplorables" may become mainstream in the coming years if enough people with social and cultural capital use it the same way Hillary used it. That's how language evolves.
In a February 3, 2013 column titled "How Political Elite Influence English Grammar and Vocabulary," I pointed out several examples of the changes in the lexis and grammar of the language that were instigated by political and cultural elites across the pond. When former President Warren Harding first used the word "normalcy" instead of the then usual "normality," he was ridiculed. But "normalcy" is now mainstream. For more examples, click on the link.
Unfortunately, only native speakers of English get to have that much influence on the language, which is both unsurprising and invidious given the status of English as a world language with more non-native speakers than native speakers. Deviations from the norm that emerge from non-native speakers are often condemned to marginality. There are exceptions, though. Chinese English speakers in the US have made enduring contributions to the lexis and structure of the language in very fascinating ways. For instance, the expression "long time no see" came to English by way of Chinese English speakers in California. This ungrammatical but nonetheless fixed English expression, which is used as a salutation by people who have not seen each other for a long time, is a loan translation from Mandarin hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn, which literally means "very long time no see." It was initially derided as "broken" English in California, but because the expression filled a real lexical and idiomatic void in the language, it quickly spread to other parts of the US, then crossed the pond to the UK, and is now part of the repertoire of international English. Expressions like "no-go area," "have a look-see," etc. were also Chinese broken English expressions that are now idiomatic in the language. (Check out my April 19, 2015 column titled "Popular Expressions English Borrowed from Other Languages" and my 4-part series titled "The African Origins of Common English Words").
To people who think enthusiasm in a foreign language is synonymous with a lack of pride in one's native language, you couldn't be more wrong. I speak Baatonun, my native language, to my children at home here in America. We don't speak English as a deliberate policy. In addition, my children don't speak English to each other. So my children have native proficiency in two languages: Baatonun (which Yoruba people call "Bariba") and English. Each time we visit Nigeria they communicate effectively with their grandparents (who don't speak English) and with their cousins, uncles and other relatives. When I went home last summer and stayed in my hometown for three weeks people were shocked that my children were more proficient in the language than many Baatonu children at home, especially children who were raised in Ilorin and other Nigerian urban centers. (Read my November 16, 2014 column titled "Anglophilia and Dying Nigerian Languages: A Personal Narrative")
My father taught me to read and write in Baatonun since I was 4 or thereabouts, and I corresponded with him in my native language throughout my days in the university and even while here in the US when email hadn't become demotic. I also take time to teach my children how to write in my language. So they are effective bilinguals like me.
But what some commentators here seem to be missing is the fact that English is the glue that holds Nigeria. Without it, there would be no Nigeria. Every multi-ethnic country needs a common language to bring its disparate peoples together. Given that Nigeria has more than 300 distinct, mutually unintelligible languages, I don't see which language can replace English as the language of government, education, the media, official communication, etc. without instigating disintegration. I recall that in my high school, we resisted learning any of the three major Nigerian languages.
Plus, English is the world's dominant language now. It's the language of scholarship, of aviation, of computer science, etc. Someone even called it the "Latin of globalization." Ignore it and risk being shut out of the world. That's why many non-English-speaking countries are increasingly adopting English as the language of instruction in their schools. South Koreans undergo lingual frenectomy (that is, surgery on their tongues) to be able to speak perfect English (see http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/18/news/adfg-tongue18), so stop all this mushy romanticization of "native language" proficiency and the pretense that only Nigerians are smitten by Anglophilia.
Farooq Kperogi
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperog
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 6:41 AM, 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Does anyone ever listen to Donald Trump mangle up the American English Language? Does anyone notice any American Professor upbraid him or put him down? By taking American English seriously, Americans understand the need for language independence, suggested by Professor Malami Buba that we take our own languages seriously - proven by research at University of Ife, Ile-Ife (now OAU) decades - we will be laying the eternal foundations of our own continental development.
I am still hoping to take seriously a challenge of a Canadian colleague that I write an essay for him in Yoruba language in my area of interest - Epistemology! I have not had the courage to do it yet, but I will, there being life and good health. This still reminds me of Tunji Oyelana on Ede Oyinbo kii se ti baba mi, shared by me previously. And it is one of the reasons I did The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society - A Study in African Philosophy of Law (2016).
Remember the distraction of African societies lacking literary cultures, literatures, histories, philosophies, social and political traditions, etc, etc. At times, I wonder why the gba ran mi d'eleru ti a ji ni do d'oko fun ni. We are a strange people in deed. Oriki Esu Laalu Ogiri Oko shows this well - o b'elekun sun'kun k'eru o b'elekun, elekun n sun'kun, Laaroye n sun ejeI Eni a pe ko wa wo gobi, to ni ki lleleyi gobi gobi? O ma se o! It did for our collective bodi! How we are now our best enemies - Narratives of Struggle (2012).
Ire ni o.
Tunde.
On Sunday, 30 October 2016, 6:18, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Salimonu,
One of my favorite lines from King Lear is, do not come between the lion and his wrath (or maybe it is wroth!)
Me too, I don't want to jump into a fight!
Please make peace, and we can move on….
Best
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 29 October 2016 at 17:12
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Kenneth Harrow, may I draw your attention to the excerpts from the response of Professor Farooq Kperogi's to Professor Bolaji Aluko's post in which the latter admitted thus, "This *outright(ly)* war is all my fault."
Kperogi: It is true that your post was the immediate trigger for my column, but I had written about this at least seven years earlier.... ..//.. Online dictionaries didn't have an entry for "outrightly" 7 years ago when I first wrote on the word.
You have lived in the US continuously for more than four decades, mostly in university environments. Ask any of your American friends or colleagues if they use "outrightly" as the adverb of "outright." It is merely to let people know that it's nonstandard, that the educated native speakers of the language don't use it.
On the part of Professor Aluko he wrote inter alia thus, "May I confess that in my 1970 WAEC, I got an A1 in English Language and Physics, A2 in Literature, Mathematics and Chemistry and A3 in French and Biology (with a torrid C4 which leaked in my year and had to be re-taken)."
My questions to you Professor Harrow are these:
1. If Professor Farooq Kperogi does not arrogate to himself the power of the sole determinant of standard English, why should the use of the word *outrightly* by Professor Aluko be the immediate trigger for his column on the same word he had written about 7 years ago?
2. If Professor Kperogi does not arrogate to himself the power of the sole determinant of standard English why should he be upset that Professor Aluko chose to adopt the usage of online dictionaries of that word?
3. What has living in the US continuously for more than four decades and mostly in the university environments by Professor Aluko, as emphasized by Kperogi, got to do with freedom of choice to use online dictionaries?
4. If Professor Kperogi does not assume himself to be the sole determinant of standard English, why does he want to let people (not Professor Aluko alone) know that "outrightly is nonstandard that the educated native speakers of the language don't use it?
5. Can Professor Kperogi give us the ratio between non-educated native speakers of English language in the US and educated native speakers of the language?
6. If the non-educated native speakers of English language are permitted to use the word "outrightly," as indirectly indicated by Farooq, without any obvious disadvantage, why then should the educated native speaker be disallowed to use it?
7. Instead of you telling us that you have never heard anyone say "outrightly" why have you not used your professorship in English to improve the online dictionaries?
Just as it has been referenced above, Professor Aluko had his basic education in Nigeria where English is not a native language, before proceeding to the US for further studies in Engineering and not in English language. Nevertheless, he would not have been able to succeed academically in his Engineering studies without adequate understanding of English Language, which is not even his mother tongue. A sophisticated mathematical problem in Engineering which Professor Aluko can solve with his eyes closed in a jiffy, Professor Kperogi, and regardless of his amplitude in English language, will not be able to solve it even if he is given a year to tackle it because a Professor of English Language does not automatically transform to a Professor of Mathematics.
Somewhere else on this thread, Professor Farooq Kperogi wrote, "I have chosen to ignore IBK's unintelligent rants because I know he is just smarting from a really hurtful smack." Professor Farooq Kperogi would appear to have forgotten the admonishment in Quran 31 : 18 that says, "And swell not thy cheek (for pride) at men, nor walk in insolence through the earth, for God loveth not any arrogant boaster." An arrogant boaster is what the psychologists call the neurotic (proud idealist) and describe as an angry person, who feels angry when events do not affirm his/her idealized self image. Interestingly, the idealistic personality can so completely identify with the wish for fictional ideal self that he/she forgets that he/she is not that ideal self and from his/her fictional heights boasts about his/her superiority to other persons. With that said I can only appeal to the Albino to look into the mirror and stop seeing himself as a white man.
S.Kadiri
Från: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> för Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Skickat: den 28 oktober 2016 22:14
Till: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
As I once stated, and now with knowledge of the context for the start of this 'outright''debate I think its in bad taste to prolong it any further not because people do not have the right to pursue their research intetests, but because participant observer research requires a measure of discretion regarding period of collation of data (or fresh data) and the time and manner of presentation.
To be blunt participant observer research as opposed to chemical research uses human communities as 'laboratory guinea pigs" and as such sensitivity and taste is paramount and this is a different order from accuracy or non accuracy of data.
Lets move on...
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 28/10/2016 19:49 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Dear ibk
Where does Farooq say he is the sole determinant of standard English?
Did I miss it?
As for proffering an opinion on what is standard or not, and a judgment on where we go to find what is standard, why can't an expert in the field offer that opinion? It isn't so easy to get judgments on such things: go look on how to provide an entry for a film in a filmography of a publication: there are zillions of different ways, so each journal or press has to find its own standard to follow. We don't do this simply on the basis of each individual's predilections.
The same when we correct our students' papers. There has to be some reference point for whether to us a possessive apostrophe after the s, as in Camus' house, or Camus's house. Which reference book are you going to use?
So why jump on Farooq for saying how we go about trying to get answers for this? why not call such a decision something that is standard? No one is gatekeeping here; it is actually interesting stuff, how all this comes about.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 28 October 2016 at 12:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Farooq Kperogi,
Your long piece enjoyed my full attention. From your feeble gatekeeping attempts at being the determinant of what is standard and non-standard English to the sad ignorant fact that you raise the use of "Rubbish in - Rubbish out" methods of using computers to determine language a dynamic living and evolving cultural phenomenon to a silly dizzying height. I am not surprised you fit that mould perfectly.
You remind me of a Yoruba proverb. "Alagbara ma mo ero, baba ole" crudely transalted into English in context of this exchange may mean a keen intellect unguided by wisdom is "outrightly" foolish.
You wrote:
"Now, let me be clear: the whole object of my intervention was not to insist that people abandon the use of the word; it is merely to let people know that it's nonstandard, that educated native speakers of the language don't use it. I neither have the power nor the inclination to police anybody's English usage. That's why the fulmination that I'm "ramming down" usage rules down people's throats is so pitifully silly."
So you are the sole determinant of what is standard and nonstandard English? My friend you are not, and you show a little maturity when you conceded that, "I neither have the power nor the inclination to police anybody's English usage." and by extension you will not be the gatekeeper and last word on what is standard or nonstandard English.
Now go and concentrate on your next paid column.
Cheers.
IBK
On 28 October 2016 at 18:05, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
Professor Aluko,
It is true that your post was the immediate trigger for my column, but I had written about this at least 7 years earlier, as the embedded link in my article shows. It wasn't your "bait" that inspired my intervention; it was both because I had written about it several times in the past and because I wanted to give people who might want to know the whole story of "outrightly" and other peculiar Nigerian English words and expressions the benefit of my knowledge.
It may interest you to know that online dictionaries didn't have an entry for "outrightly" 7 years ago when I first wrote on the word. It was added courtesy of repeated searches for the word in search boxes of online dictionaries, apparently by non-native English speakers who habitually use it on analogy to the adverbial form of "right." Modern lexicography has incorporated web-based corpus linguistics in generating the lexical repertoire of languages. This is particularly true of English. So the fact that a word exists in (an online) dictionary actually doesn't say much. It merely means lexicographers have determined that the word is used often enough by so many people to deserve an entry. Dictionaries that incorporate usage notes will often go further and indicate if a word is nonstandard, regional, informal, formal, archaic, etc. "Ourightly" may well acquire sufficient social prestige to be countenanced in educated circles in the UK, the US and other countries where English is a native language, but it's not there yet.
You have lived in the US continuously for more than four decades, mostly in university environments. Ask any of your American friends or colleagues if they use "outrightly" as the adverb of "outright." Maybe we should ask Dr. Harrow, a professor of English and native speaker of the language, how the word sounds to him.
Now, let me be clear: the whole object of my intervention was not to insist that people abandon the use of the word; it is merely to let people know that it's nonstandard, that educated native speakers of the language don't use it. I neither have the power nor the inclination to police anybody's English usage. That's why the fulmination that I'm "ramming down" usage rules down people's throats is so pitifully silly.
I am paid by Daily Trust to write a weekly grammar column and a weekly general-interest column. That's why I write every week and share what I write on social media platforms. Hundreds of people ask me questions on grammar and usage every single day, most of which inform my weekly interventions. I was busy last week and decided to expand on my response to your post for my column.
If you intentionally use certain words and expressions that you know to be nonstandard, because you are addressing a specific audience that recognizes and habitually uses the nonstandard expressions, say Nigerian English speakers, that is perfectly legitimate. I do that all the time myself. For instance, I realize that most Nigerians say "blackmail" where native English speakers would say "smear." So I say "blackmail" (where I should say "smear") when I write for an exclusively Nigerian audience, especially on social media. But I know enough not to say that when my audience is global. I once called the capacity to navigate the contours of different linguistic environments in the same language "multi-dialectal linguistic competence." If you had defended your use of "outrightly" as an intentional usage directed at a Nigerian audience, I would have been one of your biggest cheerleaders. But you insisted that it was Standard English because some online dictionaries have an entry for it, which is "outrightly" (hahaha!) wrong.
This is important because knowing the difference between unique Nigerian English usage and Standard English usage can sometimes be life-changing for many people. If you have some time, read these articles I wrote two years ago on how Nigerian English can cause you to be mistaken for a 419 email scammer by native English speakers in the West:
See below the introduction I wrote to the series:
Have you ever sent an email to someone or some people in the United States, Canada, Britain or some other English-speaking Western country and didn't get a response? Well, it is entirely possible that your email didn't even make it to their inbox. If it did, it is also possible that certain uniquely Nigerian expressions in your email that were popularized in the West by Nigerian email scam artists triggered a scam alarm and caused you to be ignored. What are these "419 English" expressions that are like waving a red flag in front of a bull in the West?
First some context. A few days ago, a Nigerian Facebook friend of mine, who is also a professor here in the United States, put up a status update that inspired this column. He wrote: "Was I really wrong? Was the professor at the other end of the telephone line correct? She read my email and decided to withdraw her offer of introducing me to people in environmental education because my written English 'is suspect.' So I asked her to give me an example of something I expressed incorrectly. The first example was 'I hope to read from you soon.' She said the correct expression is 'I hope to hear from you soon.'
"I cleared my throat and informed her that it was not a face-to-face communication and that I thought the word to hear did not fit into a totally text-based communication. She did not sound impressed and till date never returned my calls. Should I change my communication style and let orality creep into my text? Does anyone know the rules about such things?"
As I wrote in my contribution to his update, the American professor who called his English "suspect" and stopped communicating with him on the basis of his "suspect" English was most certainly rude and uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, ending email communication with "I hope to read from you soon" is not only unconventional among native English speakers; it's also one of the core phrases associated with 419 emails from Nigeria, which is frankly unfair because it's part of the lexical and expressive repertoire of Nigerian English. It's the worst example of what I call the pathologization of the linguistic singularities of a people.
However, this incident should cause us to reflect on the place of Nigerian English in inter-dialectal English communication, especially because 419 emails have done more to popularize Nigerian English to the rest of the English-speaking world than anything else. That means the stylistic imprints of scam emails from Nigeria vicariously criminalize many innocent Nigerians, as the Nigerian professor's case and similar other unreported cases have shown.
Concerns about authorship attribution of fraudulent e-mail communications emerged fairly early in studies of Internet fraud. Computational linguists and information systems specialists have deployed strategies to perform software forensics with intent to identify the authors of fraudulent e-mails. Oliver de Vel and his colleagues, for instance, employed a Support Vector Machine learning algorithm for mining e-mail content based on its structural characteristics and linguistic patterns in order to provide authorship evidence of scam e-mails for use within a legal context.
I know this because about 10 years ago I did research on the rhetorical strategies and stylistic imprints of 419 emails. In the course of my research I came across several forensic linguistic programs that developed email authorship identification markers based solely on phrases and expressions that are unique to 419 email scams. The software developed from these programs helps people automatically trash "419-sounding" emails.
The problem, as you can expect, is that the software also deletes many legitimate emails from honest Nigerians since the alarm triggers for the software are uniquely Nigerian English expressions. "Hope to read from you soon" features prominently in the repertoire of "red-flag" expressions the software uses to identify 419 emails. (For evidence, search "I hope to read from you soon" on Google and see what comes up).
When my friend quoted his American acquaintance as saying that his English was "suspect" based on certain expressions, such as "I hope to read from you soon," I knew immediately that the American was hinting that some of his expressions raised Nigerian 419 email authorship identification red flags. The professor is probably familiar with 419 email authorship identification programs and the phrases that trigger them.
One won't be entirely wrong to call the whole host of 419 email authorship identification programs as engaging in borderline linguistic racism because they basically pathologize and criminalize the stylistic idiosyncrasies of an entire non-native English variety. All of us who were born and educated in Nigeria can't escape Nigerian English inflections in our quotidian communicative encounters every once in a while. The 419 scam artists write the way they do because they are the products of the Nigerian linguistic environment. It's like isolating American English expressions that appear regularly in the emails of American scammers and developing an authorship identification program based on these expressions so that any email from any American, including even the American president, that uses any stereotyped American English expression is automatically "suspect."
Well, instead of dwelling in self-pitying lamentation, I've decided to highlight some of the stock Nigerian English expressions that email authorship identification programs use to identify Nigerian 419 email scammers—and unfairly criminalize many honest Nigerians.
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperog
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 3:01 AM, Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com> wrote:
TF:
This "outrught (ly)* war is all my fault.
I used the word innocently recently without ever knowing that it had been explicutly banned as non-standard by English Professor Farooq (Faruk?) on these boards. One of my usual caterwauling trasducers - fancifully called Nebukadineze (Nebukadnezzer?) - then wrote that it was not an English word at all, only for me to show that it exists in several reputable online dictionaries (I have not bought a physical dictionary in forty yesrs), only for Farooq to write that only words in the physical Oxford dictionary count, particularly in polite company should be used by educated professorial l elites like himself and yours truly.
But before Farooq actually came into the war - I know I shouldn't start a sentence with "but*, but who is grading? - I had teased him by once signing off as mimicking him. He took the bait in Trumpian fashion - with his admirers and detractors then taking him on ever since with Trumpian- and Clintonian-support gusto. He has in the process shown himself as a true English Language (Sergeant) Major, no pun intended.
May I confess that in my 1970 WAEC, I got an A1 in English Language and Physics, A2 in Literature, Mathematics and Chemistry and A3 in French and Biology (with a torrid C4 in BK which leaked in my year and had to be re-taken). Emulating one weird friend also prepsring for WASCE, I read a dictionary daily, seeking a new word (and its usage and pronunciation) each day. So I was really torn between becoming a Kperogi or myself - but God saved me, and I became an Engineer!
So let us move on. I will continue to use words as I see fit. If you don't know the meaning of any word that I use, please ask, and I will tell you. If it is not in the dictionary of your choice, please add it to the next edition - and I would thereby have joined the zillion makers of the language.
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
On Thursday, October 27, 2016, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Dear all:
Three members on this list provide the best in terms of service, far more than I can ever do:
Farooq on sensitivity to words, language, and governance. We cannot thank him enough. I cherish reading all his post and I actually send many of them to my students. I once challenged him in a private message to discuss how we can move forward as a nation as he has fresh ideas which break conventional boundaries and he is not a respecter of traditions that don't work.
Funmi on expanding our reading and creative horizons. We cannot thank her enough. I don't know her, and I was touched as to how she reacted when she lost a friend and a relation, the professor killed by his driver.
Yona on resources to transform the continent. We are grateful.
The recent discussion on "outright" and "outrightly", to me, contains outright distractions which may be outrightly unnecessary. Stop.
Let us celebrate greatness when we see one: these three talented people are doing this generation a lot of service. Farooq is not driving down his ideas down anyone's throat, just as prophets of change don't accompany their words with AK47; Funmi is not calling anyone an illiterate for not reading her weekly recommended texts; and Yona is not asking anyone to use the resources.
Stay blessed, we all. I use "we all" in a deliberate version. Language is located in context and tradition: what is after 6 is more than 7. Someone sees 7, but others can see 13! If you see 13, do not think the one who sees 7 is wrong.
TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
104 Inner Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7222 (fax)
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