‘This diminutive writer has been an inspiration for many young writers
and scholars,’ said the clumsily-written cover-page story on a Telugu
playwright in a ‘Metroplus’ supplement to the Vijayawada edition of a national newspaper.
Diminutive? Did the reporter really mean this? Diminutive in what sense? In physical
size or in literary standing? Asymmetrically inset into the text was a huge
picture of a tall broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a lugubrious face making
a pathetic attempt at smiling which deepened the mournful expression on his
face. ‘This towering figure,’ I said to myself, ‘would perhaps be diminutive in
a land of Brobdingnagians.’ Did the author of the article, then, mean that the
writer was a man of poor literary reputation? But the caption to the picture
dispelled this doubt. ‘Writer par excellence … … wears many hats with elan’ screamed
the red-and-black caption. As a matter
of fact, the entire article, though marred by awkward syntax, was a panegyric
on the playwright; “diminutive” was the only jarring note.
However, what caused this curious incongruity was not hard to
understand. Newspaper reporters who want to embellish their stories often
depend on online dictionaries and thesauruses; the dependence seems to be excessive
in provincial towns where, for want of competent writers in English, people
with a nodding acquaintance with the English language are appointed as
reporters. Not having the advantage of wide reading which can help one to be
discriminating in one’s word choice, these novice reporters mindlessly pick up high-flown
expressions from online thesauruses and use them in their stories with amusing
results: the words either fail to collocate or sound pretentious or produce
paradoxical figures of speech. Perhaps the journalist who wrote the story
wanted to say that the playwright was a great writer and looked for
grand-sounding synonyms for “great” in an online thesaurus which displayed both
synonyms and antonyms for the word. Perhaps, instead of picking a synonym, he
hastily picked up an antonym which didn’t quite roll of his tongue (When an
English word doesn’t roll off an Indian tongue with ease, it is considered
powerful.)
Interestingly, the goof-up doesn’t seem to have provoked any protest; in
any case, the Reader’s Editor (RE) hasn’t listed it in his errata so far. But
if all the goofs and gaffes on the regional pages of English-language
newspapers were to be listed, an entire broadsheet of errata would have to be
published every day with a large team of senior editors dealing exclusively
with corrections. Mercifully, newspapers don’t do that. Even the best of
newspapers correct less than 2 per cent of their errors, the majority of which,
I must hasten to add, are factual rather than grammatical ones. Correcting grammatical
errors will never be more than a pipe dream.
Let me explain what I mean with some examples from a newspaper that
ranks well in accuracy, both factual and grammatical. At the ELT Centre of
Gudlavalleru Engineering College, I offer a 70-hour FDP on writing. As part of
the programme, the trainees, consisting of engineering faculty, analyse
discourse features of written texts. Newspapers come in handy here; as often as
not, the trainees choose newspaper reports for their analysis. In March 2017,
the trainees, under the guidance of the trainers, identified errors of
different kinds – clumsy syntax, elephantine constructions that tend to obscure
the meaning, poor connection between ideas, weak grammar, incongruity, and
tautology – in news reports from the Vijayawada edition of one particular
newspaper which I don’t want to name here. Here are some of the discourse-level
corrections from that long list:
March
14, 2017
Nod for 11 private
universities to set up campuses in State
Vijayawada
The representatives of private
universities which have not yet received permission are seen making rounds in
the corridors of the Secretariat these days to find out the status of their
applications. Sources, however, say that the government insists on the
universities announcing the schedule of the academic year and admissions first.
The government expects the
universities to commence admissions in the coming academic year and then
develop buildings and other infrastructure in a phased manner. ‘Once permission
is given, the universities will have to start functioning immediately,’ said an
official who did not want to be quoted.
March 14, 2017
Nellore
Collector seeks to
allay fears over airport project
The district administration has
sought to allay the fears of the people of Nellore in the wake of speculations
that the Dagadarthi airport project might be shifted from Kavali. District
Collector R Mutyala Raju has reassured them that there are no such plans though
there have been demands for relocating the airport project closer to the
Krishnapatnam industrial area, considering its potential for cargo traffic.
March 21, 2017
Guntur
Central parking at
Brodipet evokes mixed reaction
The Guntur
Urban Police have begun enforcing a proposal to have central parking on the
busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of commercial shops. While the results have been
encouraging so far as the space is just enough for parking of two-wheelers,
parking of cars is becoming extremely difficult.
The Guntur Urban Police have started enforcing
their decision of central parking on the busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of
commercial shops, and the results have been encouraging so far. However,
there is room for only two-wheelers, and it is difficult to park cars there.
Nihal Singh, who had a five-decade-long distinguished career in
journalism, said in a blog post a couple of months before his death on 16 April
2018: ‘The mélange of Indian English, British English, American English and
plain bad English is a unique contribution of our newspapers to world
journalism.’
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