Earlierise

An editor at the desk the other day asked what should be the word to mean 'to cause something to happen earlier,' the reply was: to earlierise. The editor who asked the question seemed a bit sceptical of the existence of the word. An instant search on Google, with -ise, returned fewer than a hundred instances and with -ize, there were fewer than 150 instances; but none of the instances gave the meaning. Only an online dictionary said it was a transitive verb; but there was no meaning. Dictionaries at hand have not listed the verb. A search later in the 1968 edition of Chamber's Twentieth Century Dictionary showed 'earlierise, v.t. to do at a date earlier than that arranged.' The verb is back-formed, but a verb that is.

Pet expressions

'The bus fell into a roadside ditch after the driver lost control over the steering wheel.' Of course, he had lost control. The accident would not have happened, otherwise.

'The learned judge acquitted one of the accused in the case as his guilt was not proved beyond doubt.' Judges are not that dumb as to acquit the accused proved guilty beyond doubt.

Both the expressions should be banished, immediately.

It's the principle

The News and Observer blog on grammar had the April 23 entry headlined 'It's the principal,' which quoted an Associated Press report that said 'payments of both interest and principle...' The other day a news draft landed at the news desk which said 'the Election Commission has in pricipal decided to....' Again, 'principal' and 'principle,' as in the college principle, have so often been interchanged in the news drafts and less so in the final versions that they have come to be concidered pet peeves, only to no dismay of the writers and editors.

Kal baishakhi or Nor'wester

Is nor'wester, as for kal baishakhi which is thunderstorm of a kind, part of the standard English expressions? asked a guest editor in the newsroom the other day as he had seen the word nor'easter in use in reports on storms coming from the United States or Canada and inferred that the word nor'wester is a northern hemisphere variation on nor'easter.

Lookup in the dictionaries and search on the Google failed to establish the existence of any such word as used for a storm. But before going into details on nor'wester, it would be better to have the word nor'wester, or northeaster in full form, defined as a cyclonic storm of the East Coast of North America, so called because the winds over the coastal area preceding the storm's passage are from the northeast. They may occur at any time of the year but are most frequent and most violent between September and April. And there are very insignificant debates where nor'easters should be called nor'westers on the belief that the most strongest winds are not from the east or northeast, which is not true. In northeaster, strong northeast winds are generated by coastal storms and as winds circulate counterclockwise around the centres of low pressures, the areas to the northwest of the centre get the northeast winds.

All the defining instances call northwester, or nor'wester for short, kind of northwesterly wind, and not storm, typical of New Zealand that blows over the Canterbury Plains and is known as Canterbury nor'westers, which is hot, usually 30 to 35 degrees Celsius, incredibly dry and very strong wind which can blow for days on end, typically occurring between . A good nor'wester can also turn crops literally, sucking the moisture out of everything. In Ch. IV of Jack London's Adventure, the text reads: 'By the second day of the northwester, Sheldon was in collapse from his fever.'

The online glossary of the American Meteorological Society defines kal baishakhi as a short-live squall at the onset of the southwest monsoon (April--June) in Bengal, with a bit of technical details from a 1938 paper, Nature of 'Nor'westers' of Bengal and their similarity with others, by Bn Banerji. The article title has nor'westers in quotation marks. A NASA web site says, 'In Bangladesh and adjacent portions of India a type of storm known as a "Nor'wester" occasionally occurs in the spring.' The word in quotations marks does again indicate that it was not a synonym proper or proper synonym of kal baishakhi. A US Navy document on Bay of Bengal storm forecast, which also has the word in quotation marks, says it is a severe type of thunderstorm, with strong squalls, typical of Bengal and is locally described as 'kal-baishakhi' or the 'fateful thing' of the month of Baishakh (April 15--May 15). There are thunder and lightning, followed by downpours of rain and sometimes hail, driven by strong winds, sometimes having almost hurricane force.

Few Indian newspapers have begun to use 'Bengal nor'wester,' although only in headline where the text contains the word storm or thunderstorm, to mean kal baishakhi as opposed to Canterbury nor'wester. I think this qualification of the word nor'wester goes perfectly well with the grammar and the context.

Clichéd collocations

A mob is always unruly, money is hard-earned, dacoity is daring, attack is grisly, killing is brutal and a murder is preplanned. On a similar note, a propositions are reiterated and conditions are always preconditions. A mindful reading of newspaper reports can make a long list of such collocations.

But a mob is, by definition, often unruly as it is not organised; money is almost always hard-erned, especially when it relates to the wages of day-labourers; dacoity, robbery in English proper, is almost always daring on part of the robbers and the word means larceny by threat of violence, which is ingredient of most robberies, sometimes resulting in the harm or murder of the victims; attack should look grizly; it might seem affection otherwise; killing is forcing a life to end its journey in this world and it should be brutal on any count; and a murder is in most cases (pre-)planned beforehand; it could otherwise be a case of homicide; and planning always PREfigures an incident; planning of an incident cannot take place after an incident.

Hurried literary flavour

News writing has customarily been (don't know if it has been any longer) considered to be 'literature in a hurry.' And the very proposition, known to all journalism students and their hangabouts, inspires the reporters and even the editors to show a bit of their literary flares, that too, often, with a touch of the easy-to-reach Shift + F7, which invokes a bare thesaurus within Microsoft Word.

There are a number of words that drafts are larded with, by reporters and editers alike, to make them read a bit literary. One such word is 'tiny.' Reporters write 'tiny traders,' very much of a private coin, in place of small traders or retailers and not to mean the people who are called midgets, and the clichéd 'tiny tots' for children. Another wrote that 'bilateral trade between the two countries amounts tiny.' One with high innovative faculty once wrote 'rotund aubergine' to distinguish, in a literary manner, as he explained, the kind of aubergine that is almost round from the kind that is taller, but also with round circumference. Another wrote 'molest' as a synonym for 'harass' in a report on a political arrest, of course with the help of the ubiquitous MS Word thesaurus. They are synonymous, in a sense, maybe; but when the police molest a political party leader aged above 60, the connotation only hints at the hardly-imagined permissiveness of society.

Someone 'took his' (was) 'birth' (born)

In the BBC television comedy series Mind Your Language, Barry Evans, who plays Jeremy Brown, a teacher of an English evening class for foreign students, asks the learners to 'take your [their] seats' one day and some of the students, probably not all, hold up high the chairs they stand behind, instead of being seated. To take someone's seat does not mean holding a chair or a bench, or even the floor of a house, it simply menas to be seated, but to the minds accustomed to English expressions and phrases. Every language has its own rule, or misrule, of expressions.

The verb 'take' was twice used in an unusual collocation, which could be spotted before the copy went to production. Much before a reporter did this, an editor wrote that 'someone took his birth in 1940.' That was a literal translation of the Bangla phrase for 'someone was born in 1940.' Although birth and death, and also marriage, are believed to be ordained, independent of the agents of the acts, in Bangla, birth is an action with transitivity done by the agent and not by God --- janma grahan kara. But such expressions signifying transitivity of mother or intransitivity of the action are also possible --- janma deoya or janma haoya. The editor and the reporter, for the moment, forgot the rules or misrules of the English language.

Amicus curiae... or the friend of court

Amicus curiae, or a friend of court, is one who is no party to the case and volunteers to help the court with his knowledge. Very often, the legal Latin phrase comes to be pluralised as 'amicus curies,' in newspapers published in English from Dhaka, which in fact should be 'amici curiae.' The writers or editors often forget that in Latin, the head word of the phrase is 'amicus' (friend) which turns into 'amici' (friends) in plural. The word is often encountered in different spellings in newspapers of Bangladesh.

The Supreme Court and its divisions

The highest court of law in Bangladesh is known as the Supreme Court, comprising the High Court division and the Appellate division. For reasons unknown, the Supreme Court building in Dhaka has always popularly been referred to as the High Court building, which should be written the Supreme Court building. The newspapers also, still for reasons unknown, write 'the High Court,' but 'the Appellate division of the Supreme Court,' and they also mean the Appellate division when they write the Supreme Court, as opposed to the High Court. If 'the High Court' works fine, 'the Appellate' should also do well. If the phrase 'the High Court' is the order, the phrase 'the Appellate division of the Supreme Court' is over-identification; and the other way round, 'the High Court' would be under-identification, if the 'the Appellate division of the Supreme Court' is the order. The newspapers are also less willing to write the word 'division' after 'the High Court,' but write 'the Appellate division' almost all the time .

In a report that was published in the business section of the newspaper, a story said the 'Supreme Court division of the Appellate division.' It was definitely a mistake on the part of the editor, but when the reporter was asked about it the next day, he replied he had seen it being so printed in other reports.

Snaker, tea-stall runner and spring friend

One of the reporters, who are innovative especially in coining words and expressions, once filed a report on the widow of a man. When the reporter was asked how the man died, he said the man just left her wife, and was alive, probably living with his second wife. Another report contained the word 'snaker' by which the reporter meant 'snake charmer.' Yet another report said the government during a drive against encroachment on governemnt land and occupation of public places fined a 'tea-stall runner' --- a man who was running a tea-stall. A weekly report on commoditiy prices printed 'aubergine' to mean 'okra' and the mistake slipped through the editors for months. The writer knew 'aubergine' meant 'okra' and the editor did not know anything of it; he passed it through as it came. One of them once wrote 'spring friend.' Asked to explain, he said he thought he had read it somewhere and used it to mean 'fair-weather friend.'

Enemies of the people

One of the reporters who cover political programmes, after attending a news briefing of a major political party, filed a report that quoted the party chief calling some people 'mass enemies,' probably on the analogy of 'mass arrest.' Clear enough, he wanted to mean 'enemy of the people' for what the party chief said in Bangla. Reading literature or even knowing the titles come of help. It's Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.

Residential hotel and passenger bus

Just after evening in Cox's Bazar way back in 1994, a rickshaw puller pointed out a restaurant, where people eat, saying that it is different from a hotel, where people stay, to a group of two, out on the streets looking for an eatery. In reports, the editors often come across an expression --- 'residential hotel.' One of the pet explanations the writers put forth is that the word 'residential' has been used to distinguish it from "hotels" were people dine. Hey, that is restaurant --- altogether a different word. Strange, they never write 'residential houses' or 'residential residences' as houses could also be used for commerical or recreational purpose.

Another such expression that is often found even in the local wire copies is 'passenger bus.' There are passenger trains and goods trains. But nobody has ever heard of any buses used solely for carrying goods. Buses always carry passengers and even when they carry goods, they are known as buses, and not goods buses. So there is no space for writers to distinguish buses, carrying people, as 'passenger buses.'

To notice

Usually someting goes unnoticed or something gets noticed; something may even comes to someone's notice, when it is a noun. But on the trails of 'to aware' to mean to make people aware and 'to back' to mean to return, 'to notice' has often come to mean 'to issue notices to or to be served notices' as in, as reporters wrote, and editors allowed the mistake to pass through, probably unknowingly, 'the city corporation authorities said they had noticed the occupants before the eviction drive' or 'the occupants said they were not noticed earlier.' Another substandard English usage, inching its way towards the Bangladeshi version of the English language.

Respectively, separate, already and jointly

Respectively, separate, already and jointly are the most mis- and abused words in newspaper reports, more so in the drafts the reporters file for the desk. In about 90 per cent cases, the words can be safely dispensed with, without any compromise on the meaning. Reporters more often write, and editors often allow, sentences such as 'the deputy commissioner visited the school and the hospital respectively,' 'the man filed two separate petitions with the court,' 'the ministry have already sent the letter to the corporation,' and 'Dhaka University and Jahangirnagar University have jointly organised the debate.'

'Respectively' has no relevance in the first example as no two sets of things are correlated. Even when two sets are correlated with 'respectively,' a rephrasing can help in dispensing with the adverb: 'Shah Alam and Shahin Islam have been elected president and general secretary of the association respectively' can easily be rephrased 'Shah Alam has been elected president and Shahin Islam general secretary to the association.'

Reporters invariably use separate with the modifiers 'two' or 'three' as if 'three single petitions' could also be regarded as semantically correct. In most cases, 'already' loses its significance and it has become clichéd; and when we name two organisers of a single event, should we write that they have done it jointly?

Weather signals and storms

Weather stories like the ones on crime are often manhandled by the reporters and the editors. In most cases, most signals come to be printed as cautionary signals, as 'cautionary' sounds a bit serious than 'warning,' quite unware of the fact that there is a difference between a cautionary signal and a warning signal in weatherspeak. In one of the reports, the phrase distant cautionary signal 3 came out in print. The error was spotted the next day. There is nothing called distant cautionary signal 3. There are only two distant signals and the subsequent signals are local, for seaports. One of the reporters who visited the coast to cover the salvage efforts after the storm in the Bay of Bengal one day wrote: the local people said the wind blew clocking a speed of more than 200 kilometres an hour which should not have been flagged with local cautionary signal 3. We could not check if the Met Office had measured wind speed. But a wind speed above 75 is considered hurricane force which, in Bangladesh, occurs in cyclones and tornadoes. The second most deadliest cyclone in Bangladesh was the 1991 cyclone, when the highest wind speed was measured at 260 kilometres an hour. The damage caused by the cyclone was estimated to be $1.5 billion and about 1,38,000 people died in the cyclone. The most deadliest, 1970 Bhola cyclone, which killed about 5,000,000 people, had a wind force of an estimated 190 kilometres an hour.

Lazurus, come from the dead

A crime report on a warrant asking some policemen to appear in court to give deposition in a murder case that landed on the news desk went logical up to several paragraphs. Just in the middle of the story, a paragraph quoted the man, who was killed seven years ago allegedly by the police, narrating what had happened just before he was killed. Interesting! He was no 'Lazurus, come from the dead,/ Come back to tell you all, ...' It made one of the editors, who rewrote the story, laugh heartily. The information was written in the first information report, he said.

Hat and prospect fertiliser

A follow-up on an incident that was the lead the previous day reached the desk from an outstation writer, which quoted a villager saying after he had sold his cow in the hat in the afternoon... The first reading of the phrase, without any leading references before, readily rang the bell -- 'Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter' from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by Thomas Eliot. Few lines down, the text unfolded. The man was selling his cow in a rural market place, which, transcribed from Bangla into Roman characters, is written, hat, and pronounced more like 'hut,' the vowel lengthened. Another story of similar origin said a dignitary would inaugurate a 'dye ammonium prospect fertiliser industry,' readily to be recognised as 'di-ammonium phosphate fertiliser industry.'

Sources are a part of society

Sourcing remains a trouble with the editors and reporters. One of the reporters once said 'Sources said ...' And he explained the 'sources' saying 'they are a part of society' to an editor when his attention was called to the sourcing. Indeed, sources are a part of society, but each part of society should not be made a source. Everything that goes in a story should be properly sourced; it leaves margin for others, otherwise, to consider the content to be editorial. It is particularly necessary if things run to court where it will help the editor, publisher or the writer to establish which portion of the story is editorial and which portion is reported. There are debates on whether to source a report only once or at several instances as required. But the entrant reporters believe it goes to their credit that they somehow come to know of the happening, as they write in the report. And they remain unwilling to divulge the source, even if the officials they talk with never request the protection of anonymity. A simple rule: never over- or under-identify sources if they do not seek anonymity; but try to identify them as specific as they can be without being spotted, if they seek not to be named. But only the words and phrases such as 'source,' 'informed source' or 'confirmed source' should not be used. And one more thing: sources should be authoritative, or relevant.

Misplaced explanation or troubled visualisation

One of the reporters, walking the political beat, covered an agitation programme of road march and filed a story which was rounded up with something like 'people in small groups from the city and its outskirts including Ramna, Dhanmondi and New Market areas joined the marchers as they proceeded towards...' Impeccable sentence. But what makes the trouble here is that Ramna, Dhanmondi and some other places that were included as outskirts in the story sprawl at the city centre. Had it been before the 1960s, when Old Town of Dhaka was demarcated by a railway going between Nagar Bhaban, the mayor's office, and Osmani Udyan, such a statement would have been correct. For a city that sprawled along the River Buriganga, Ramna or Dhanmondi were more than outskirts. One of the editors said it was a problem of visualisation; the reporter put it down all to an early deadline and the pressure of three stories. But the problem lies with the shoddy construction of the sentence and the indifference of letting it land the desk without a second read. A second read improves much of the stories, which reporters consider an unwarranted job on their part.

Comme une vache espagnole

They say in French il parle français comme une vache espagnole — he speaks French like a Spanish cow, usually referring to someone speaking bad French (we have heard that not being able to speak French is being illiterate and speaking bad French is barbaric). But the superficial essence of the phrase manifested in an out-of-the-station copy that landed the newsroom a couple of days ago. The copy was larded with mistakes in each of its line, without making any trouble in being understood though. But one of the editors said there was a mistake which cannot be excused. The last sentence of the copy had the phrase 'others received past aid from different clinics'' where the writer means to say 'first aid.' The people of Noakhali had a persistent problem of pronouncing 'f' as 'p' in Bangla, which manifested in his English writing. It shows schooling, espeically primary, still has a long way to go in Bangladesh.