Sloppy substitute for 'after'

Grammarians are against the use of 'following' as a preposition; so are the stylebooks of newspapers which ask writers and editors to use 'after,' almost always. 'Following' needs a noun to agree with as this is the participle of 'to follow,' the verb: 'his promotion, following his hard work, was expected.' But 'following the verdict, the judge walked out of the courtroom' sounds awkward. 'After' could best express the meaning. It is also better to use 'in accordance with' in sentences such as 'following the High Court order, the government promulgated the ordinance.' 'As a result of' is better in places such as 'it came to my notice following a recent visit of the people concerned.' 'Following shower last night, the roads collected water' could be rephrased with 'in consequence of' for better. Although 'following' is regarded as a sloppy, and sometimes pretentious, substitute for 'after,' the onslaught of 'following' for 'after' might force its acceptance as a preposition, at least by descriptive grammarians.

The digit that sticks out or gets in

Someone can point a, or the, finger at someone else and someone else can equally give someone the finger for that, although giving someone the finger, done by raising the middle finger towards someone, is offensive, and obscene. But fingering someone can only be done with the consent of the person administered, otherwise, it might be considered a felony.

'To finger,' in the literary world, can mean to touch with the fingers, or play on (instruments) with the fingers; but the verb, in the world of slang, can mean to penetrate fingers into women's genitals.

A reporter wrote that the authorities had fingered some people for making troubles; in the standard meaning, this can be embarrassing for the troublemakers and in the other meaning, the authorities might be sued on charge of 'forced penetration with a foreign object.' Expressions matter, even if they involve fingers, or even fists.

Even after all these things, fingering someone is considered polite in the Unix world: 'finger <e-mail>' is the standard command to find out if the person with the e-mail address is logged in to a computer network.

Prior to... posterior to

'Prior to' as a preposition, many grammarians say, is close to non-English, although text that lands at the desk remains larded with the phrase. 'Prior to' also finds way to reports published in newspapers where English is the first language for most of the writers and editors, although most house styles advise them not to use it as a preposition. Almost all of the stylebooks say 'before' is simple.

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern Usage does not object to the use use "prior to" at best in cases where the connection between two events is 'more essential than the simple time relation.' Ernest Gowers in his The Complete Plain Words said: 'There is no good reason to use prior to as a preposition instead of before. Before is simpler, better known and more natural, and therefore preferable.' The stylebook of the Times asks reporters and editors not to use 'prior to,' but the newspaper keeps printing sentences with 'prior to' as a preposition, even sentences such as 'they were unbeaten here prior to today,' which sounds awkward.

John Bremner, a teacher of journalism at the University of Kansas, once asked, 'If you don't use posterior to, why use prior to? Would you say "Posterior to the game, we had a few drinks?" So why say "Prior to the game, we had a few drinks?" Make it: "Before and after (and even during) the game, we had a few drinks."'

Most stylebooks also ask the people on the writing and editing panel not to use the phrase 'ahead of' as a synonym for 'before' in temporal relation. The use of the phrase in 'she stands far ahead of him' or 'Bebo is marginally ahead of Facebook' in spatial context is permissible; its use also sounds sound in contexts such as 'she is far ahead of her time.' But its use in 'ahead of polls' as a synonym for 'before' is deprecated.

Burglary at bank

Dhaka newspapers keep calling the recent burglary at the Dhanmondi branch of the BRAC Bank a robbery. Why? Perhaps the huge amount of gold and money taken away by the gang led the editors, and the writers, to believe that it could be a robbery. Perhaps there are something else. Whatever the case is, this is a simple case of burglary. No one knew when the incident, detected early January 6, took place. None of the offended was present and there was no use of force; the roof and lockers were broken and money and gold were taken away.

Robbery is taking something away from someone by the use of force, threats or intimidation, committed in the presence of the victim. An unlawful entry of a building, when windows and doors are broken or forced, screens, walls or roofs broken and tools used or even when doors or windows remain unlocked, for a theft or felony is described as burglary. Larceny is burglary only when the entry is not illegal and forcible. Theft is often synonymous with larceny.

The Bangladesh Penal Code defines robbery as robbery when it is committed by less than five persons and dacoity when it is committed by five or more than five persons, punishable with imprisonment for varying periods. Henry Yule's Hobson-Jobson says, 'The term, being current in Bengal, got into the Penal Code. By law, to constitute dacoity, there must be five or more in the gang committing the crime.' In the English laws, the Bangladesh Law Commission in a report in 1998 said, robbery is synonymous with robbery and dacoity. The distinction is still maintained in the penal codes of India and Pakistan, in keeping with the continuity. The Indian Penal Code 1860 became the Pakistan Penal Code after 1947 and the Bangladesh Penal Code after 1971.

Literal use of figures of speech

There were jubilations. People were out on the streets at almost midnight. It was a cricket feat. A junior reporter wrote the team and the people were over the moon at winning the game. A senior editor punched his literary acumen into the report and rephrased it as '... literally over the moon...' which sounded an absurd proposition.

The first manned landing on Earth's Moon took place on July 20, 1960 as part of the Apollo 11 mission commanded by Neil Armstrong, joined in by Edwin Aldrin. Since then, 24 astronauts have travelled to the Moon --- 12 walking on the surface and three making the trip twice. There were no players and no common people among them.

Moral: Never use the word 'literally' in reports. Its use, at the hands of reporters and editors, is wrong in most cases, and entails judgement of a sort.

Mass songs, mass enemies and muss

A news item on next day's programmes in the metropolis one day described a session as of 'mass songs' by which the writer meant people's songs, from the Indian People’s Theatre Association of theatre-artists and others to bring about cultural awakening among the people in the early 1940s. Mass is a convenient translation of the Bangla word in question, gana. A student of journalism (mass communictions and journalism, gana yogayog o sangbadikata) in a story quoted political party leaders terming their rivals 'mass enemies' (people's enemy, ganashatru). Yet in another report the word was spelt 'muss.'

Including or such as

Crimes are crimes, nothing more and nothing less. But a report that landed the desk the other day defined crimes with an abused 'including' --- 'serious crimes including the arrest of a criminal with arms happened...' The arrest of criminals is a crime of a sort and an arrest with firearms is a crime of a more serious nature. 'Including' defines the nature of the phrase that precedes it; it does not make any addition. 'Three people, including a dog...' only equates dogs with humans.

'Including' is also misused in cases where 'such as' fits in. 'Concentrated urbanisation is typical of cities such as Khulna, Chittagong and Rajshahi.' An 'including' would have made the sentence go wrong. But the use of 'including' in 'the government will set up the plants in four cities including Khulna and Rajshahi' is correct. 'Such as' explains the nature of the phrase that precedes it.

Sidr: the jujube tree cyclone

A daily newspaper in Bangla the day after very severe cyclonic storm Sidr had roared inland through west Bangladesh coasts in the afternoon on November 15 ran a report on the front page, headlined 'Sidr means eye.' The report said it is a Sinhalese word for 'eye' or 'hole'. A newspaper in English the next day in a report said it means 'hole' or 'eye' in Sinhalese. The origin of the word as laid out in the reports stands little chance to be correct. And the train of thought is perhaps influenced by the analogy that the cyclone had an eye, which is typical of all strong tropical cyclones with an area of sinking air at the centre.

The Sinhalese word for 'eye' is what could be written as 'aesa,' with the first syllable 'ae' pronouncing 'a' as in ash, and the second 'sa' pronouncing with a neutral relase of the vowel. The Sinhalese word for 'hole' is 'sidura.' But that does not help in this argument as the name given to the cyclone has been contributed by Oman, and that too in Arabic. Other names Oman has provided for the series are Baaz, Ward, Mujan, Hudhud, Nada, Luban and Maha.

In keeping with the table of names of tropical or subtropical cyclones in the North Indian Ocean, internationally agreed on and valid between mid-2004 and 2009, the system that developed near the Andaman islands on November 9 as an area of disturbed water and dissipated over the eastern Himalaya on November 16 after striking Bangladesh packing a speed of 240kmph officially at 5:00pm (Bangladesh Time) was christened Sidr, from as-sidrah or as-sidr, the Arabic word for Ziziphus spina-christi, which is commonly known as jujube tree.

The sidr tree, also known as lote tree, Christ's thorn, or nabkh tree, is mentioned in the Qur'an. The tree is also mentioned in Ibn Sina's Cannon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb). In Oman, the crushed leaves of the sidr tree were used to clean the hair, a beauty-care product.

The next possible cyclone of the North Indian Ocean may be named as Nargis, contributed by Pakistan, or Abe, by Sri Lanka, or Khai-muk, by Thailand.

That that that does not matter

Standard grammatical norms are in many cases not applied to the writing and editing as English, which is not the cradle tongue of the writers and editors of the Dhaka-based newspapers, remains something to be learnt --- the harder the way, the better the standards adhered to. The house style asks the editors and writers to drop 'that' in cases where it is not important for meaning.

There are two such most-frequented contexts in English --- in relative clause and in that-clause. In both the cases, 'that,' where it does not add substantially to meaning, could be dropped. And the aspects of the grammar have their names too.

Grammatically speaking, the first case in which 'that' is dropped in a relative clause is called 'zero relative clause': 'this is the house Jack built' from 'this is the house that Jack built.' In the second case in which 'that' is dropped in a that-clause is called 'zero that-clause': 'he said he would be late' from 'he said that he would be late.'

A few editors at a review meeting said they should not follow the sequence of tenses when 'that' is dropped in a that-clause; dropping just a 'that' off a that-clause should not allow any writers or editors to flout the rule of the sequence of tenses, although some news agencies do that bit of flouting.

Apostrophe ess

A copy out of the desk had the headline printed in the newspaper as 'Court orders freeze on Dhaka Bank accounts of Abba's wife.' The mistake was spotted the next morning when the newspaper reached all its readers. This is an example of how mistakes develop at the layout unit, or on the stone, as they said in the olden days. In this case for instance, an editor, standing by the layout man with the page sprawling in QuarkXPress on the monitor before him, in passing said that this time it was Abba(s)'s wife (abba is the Bangla word for 'father') and the man doing the layout somewhow thought the word should be changed from Abbas' to Abba's.

The repoter in the evening claimed the headline was printed as he wrote it the previous night. And the editor who corrected the copy defended the reporter and said the reporter had written Abbas's and he changed it to Abbas' in consultation with another editor who also thought 's after Abbas might be somewhat incorrect, in which the Associated Press copies might have a role as Abbas', to mean of Abbas, according to the Associated Press Stylebook, is the order.

The house style of the newspaper says: 'possessive in words and names ending in s normally takes an apostrophe followed by a second s: Jones's, James's, this is mostly in case of modern names: use the plural apostrophe where it helps: Mephistopheles' rather than Mephistopheles's.'

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr, published in 1918, says: 'Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.... This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press. Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus''

The textbook Practical English Grammar by AJ Thomson and AV Martinet also says: 'classical names ending in s usually add only the apostrophe... other names ending in s can take 's or the apostrophe alone.' Both forms are correct. The newspaper prescribes its editors, and writers, to make the distinction between the ancient names and the modern ones. Abbas is a man modern, when it comes to grammar.

Beyond denotations, thoughts

This was for the second time a report contained the word 'ancient' to mean such an old party as the Awami League. In a report earlier, 'ancient' was used to mean 'old' pipelines (Posting on June 14, 2007 'Ancient pipelines and ancestors'). When people around were asked how old they thought the party was, everyone started counting from 1949 when on June 23 the party was founded at a convention of a faction of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League.

Dictionaries define the word 'ancient' as 'of or relating to a remote period, to a time early in history.' The reporter might have thought anything before his birth, which was in remote past as he could recall nothing of such incidents, was ancient. The dictionary is at fault; it has not given any timeline for being ancient. Dictionaries usually talk about denotations, but the people who trade in words should also think about the connotations associated.

An editor the same day, or the night, to be precise, wrote that some people had gathered at a place at the news of 'the unnoticed closure of a factory.' How can a factory be closed without being noticed? He readily punched in the word 'unnoticed' in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary the program, where the definition flashed 'without being seen or noticed' with two examples, still having in his mind that 'noticed' meant 'something or someone not served with notices' (Posting on March 22, 2007, 'To notice').

An order in adjectives

Many reports that land at the news desk, and also many reports that get in print in other Dhaka-based newspapers, have the adjectives out of order, especially when it comes to the use of adjectival and nominal adjectives --- a situation in which an adjective and a noun modify a noun. Reports often contain 'Dhaka University acting vice-chancellor' 'Awami League acting president,' or 'Sylhet acting mayor.'

A common rule of the English grammar, although exceptions might be around, is that central adjectives, which are gradeable and more adjectival than denominal adjectives, which retain the properties of nouns, are placed farther before nouns. The more adjectival the word is, the farther from noun it is; the less adjectival, or more nominal, the word is, the nearer to the noun it is. The phrases should aways be 'acting Dhaka University vice-chancellor,' 'acting Awami League president' or 'acting Sylhet mayor.'

There is one more point to consider. The phrase unit is Dhaka university vice-chancellor and the word acting modifies the unit, being placed before the whole of it; there is no space for split adjectivisation when someone still holding a position entrusts the deputy to stand in to work as the incumbent during a period of absence.

Review and reviewal

An editor replaced the word 'review' with 'reviewal' in a story on a group of administration officials seeking a process to be reviewed. A second look to modify the headline for fitting in the designated space on the page by another editor, who found the word to be a bit news-unlikely, resulted in a mild debate on whether the word should be retained. The word is not there in practical dictionaries, which means it would sound a bit uncommon for newspaper readers. The word is there in Chamber's and in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It is also there in the Random House and in Webster's. While some sources define it as only being 'the act of reviewing,' some others also tagged the word 'a review' in the definition, after 'the act of reviewing.' A dictionary web site says it is 'the act or an instance of reviewing,' which it lists as the seventh definition of the word 'review.' The Random House Unabridged lists its first instance in text in 1640-50 as a word made up of review + al, a suffix (< Latin -āle (singular), -ālia (plural), nominalised neuter of -ālis) which forms nouns from verbs, usually of French or Latin origin. Revue is French from which the word 'review' has derived. The first editor said the context demands the sense of 'the act of reviewing,' which others differed on and said it meant 'review,' for which the -al suffix was not necessary. Yet some others thought it was an archaic word, but none of the dictionaries listed it as archaic; and its continues to be in use in modern, general English. The word is found in governemnt documents (the planning commission favoured reviewal of the plan) in countries where the language is English and even in a New York Times report on court proceedings (... a writ of certiorari for the reviewal of the action of the tax commissioners). The word is there in text on web sites on technology (In reviewal of nursing staffs on how to deal with patients), academic web sites (peer reviewal) and writeups and even in few blogs, which suggest the word is not so unfamiliar an entity for people to avoid using it. It has also been found in personal e-mail communications (I am in reviewal of a book at the moment). The word was let in print, for the second time. Should writers and editors of newspapers use it? If the context warrants 'the act of reviewing,' yes: as in reviewal fee, the first reviewal study or in the reviewal process, the typeface is a 14th century reviewal, etc. But in almost all the case the suffix-less 'review' should do, in news stories, at least. Some other such words ending in -al are revisal, surveyal or disbursal --- all nominalised forms of verbs, which are also nouns, with the -al suffix; and yet some others are refusal, denial or dismissal -- formed from the verbs, which are not in use as nouns in associated senses. The word 'reviewal' may have fallen out of fashion in everyday use (a Google search returns less than 20,000 instances). But it certainly has continued to be in use in literary text (a critical reviewal of War and Peace, a reviewal copy of the film, which according to Chamber's could be replaced with 'review copy'), legal documents (a reviewal of an agreement, upon attorney's reviewal, the draft will be sent to the commission), or elsewhere. There should also be a difference between 'a review proposal' and 'a reviewal proposal.' But the state of not being reviewed can readily be called 'non-reviewal' of books or plans, as the verbal sense is obviously dominant. 'Reviewal' is also used to mean funeral visitation or viewing: if there is no reviewal and burial occurs within 72 hours of death, embalming is not necessary.

Swindlers who drug and loot people

In news for quite a long time though, gangs that drug and loot people, especially passengers on buses and trains, have made Dhaka front-page headlines for a few months. The gang members offer passengers biscuits or similar food items containing sedatives and even drinking water mixed with intoxicants to drug them unconscious before decamping with what the passengers have on them. Among the policemen and in Bangla newspapers, such gangs are known as 'ajnan (or agyan, in popular spelling, or even oggan, in the basest form) party.' As the use of the phrase 'agyan party' sounds a bit awkward in English, a decision was made on 'drugger' (from 'to drug' people) to be used instead. This also sounded awkward and the word is not in dictionaries in the sense. But it kept being used with no other appropriate words or phrases around. Besides, 'drugger' in today's fringe English means 'someone among the friends doing drugs; a polite, friendly way of calling someone like a drug addict' or 'someone who calls in the middle of the night and, being sentimental, talks for minutes even if the mobile is on voice mail or he is not being listened to.' Some proposed the use of 'doper' which is also an agent noun with a sense of intransitivity, someone who smokes marijuana on a regular basis.

A report in an Indian newspaper in 1999, as searched online, called such a group 'biscuit gang' and explained the 'modus operandi' of the gang in a sentence down the second paragraph. Another report in an Indian newspaper said 'the police busted a drugging gang operating in Delhi.' Yes, 'drugging gang.' This is perhaps the best of the options, and 'drugging gangsters.' 'Doping gang' might do, but the instance of the phrase is rarer, compared with the instance of 'drugging gang.' But it is not the drug gang, which will mean a gang involved in the traffic in drug substances. An Agence France-Presse report, datelined Bangkok, January 8, 1997 was headlined 'Thai police investigating tourist drugging gang,' but the copy carefully avoided using the phrase and used narration to describe the event.

Hardly hit or hit hard

An out-of-the-station writer in a report on a clash between villagers and a gang of smugglers said 'the villagers earlier hardly protested against the operation of the gang.' He meant 'strongly,' of course. The wrong use of the adverb was spotted and corrected. But another use of the word escaped (?) the editor's eye and this time it was a copy by an in-house writer. The report said 'the poor are hardly affected by the spiralling prices of essential commodities.' He meant 'badly affected' or 'hit hard.'

On the loss of hyphens

A news agency report on the de-hyphenation of 16,000 words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary said the words lost hyphens in the age of the internet. They have either become one word or two separate words. The report contained examples in a sentence: 'Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.' But the one-word example of 'bumblebee' came out hyphenated, not as used in forming compound noun, but in a way hyphen gets in between two portions of the word when they break down on the edge of a column.


It could perhaps be corrected when the newspaper pages come out on 'whites (paper)' as proof copies for corrections. But hardly a story is read then unless the headline strikes a big mismatch.

Indifference of a different sort

The prefix in- does not always make words antonyms. People of different sorts can be equally indifferent and there can be indifference of different sorts. The prefix does not negate the meaning. The draft of a report on electoral reforms dialogues between the election authorities and some political parties, who have entered into an alliance, should have said the parties would put forth identical proposals on reforms. But the writer came up with the word 'indifferent' [in the sense of not being different] to mean 'identical': 'The party on Friday decided to submit indifferent proposals for electoral reforms with all the components of the alliance during the dialogue scheduled for November 4.' One of the editors burdened with load beyond his capacity suggested the word 'indifferent' when the writer asked for the English word of the Bangla expression.

Troublesome -ages

Four -ages keep causing inconveniences to writers and editors. Somehow writers and editors take 'damages' for plural of 'damage,' which it is not. Damages are given for a damage done; they are not to mean 'damage in more cases than one.' Another -age, wastage, often appears in problematic contexts. There can nothing be something as 'industrial wastages.' Wastage means the process of wasting, loss by wear or waste or an amount that is wasted or lost by wear. Yet another -age, bondage, is often used in wrong context in reports. Writers prefer to write bondage (the state of a slave or a prisoner) as it sounds more formal than bond, a word which should be correct in most contexts. People can be kept in bondage but no two friendly people can have bondage between them; there should rather be a bond of friendship. There is another -age, a jargon for 'link' in most cases, that troubles writers, and, of course, editors. Linkage is often used in the first meaning of the word 'link' --- (someone or) something that connects two or more people, but the primary meaning of the word linkage, the process of linking or being linked, is often stashed away to be expressed in some complex phrases. When an organisation 'forms linkages with' ethnic minority groups, it, in effect, carries out activities or shares information with them. Forming linkages 'struts and frets,' but other choices signify comprehensibility.

Opertationalize... conditionalities

One on the desk with commendable ability at editing business stories, asked by another, with little understanding of financial matters, about the meaning of a phrase that was in the story, said 'classified loans' meant 'bad debts.' That's that. The writer should have changed the phrase in the first place, at least for common newspaper readers. Loans that are substandard, doubtful or loss are collectively known as 'classified loans.' But why should common readers bother about such perfect definitions?

Such pretentious stand-ins, out of social development and financial harangues, keep coming in news reports, which, despite insistence by writers and permissiveness by editors, are best avoided. A report the other day said some funds for flood victims were 'operationalized.' Other such words most frequently used in reports are 'conditionalities,' 'modaliites' and 'utilize,' which should have long been funeralized.

Simple, easy words for 'operationalize' are 'to carry out,' 'to work on,' 'to arrange' or even 'to do.' 'The plan will be operationalized in 18 months' time' could easily be rephrased as 'the plan will be carried out in a year and a half.' Development organisations define 'conditionality' as the principle that access to new loans, aid and debt relief should be conditioned on meeting certain conditions, which is nothing but a condition. The Tribune of India in an editorial in August 1998 wrote 'The World Bank and the IMF gladly offered to help, but with conditions -- or conditionalities in their jargon -- attached.'

Similar is the case with the word 'modality.' 'The programme will operationalize its objectives through two primary modalities' means nothing but 'the programme will work in two ways.' 'The government is planning expansion in the modalities of shelter for flood victims' in effect means nothing but 'the government will offer more kinds of shelter for flood victims.'

Another word that has been consistently abused is 'utilize' which means 'to make use of.' This over-used word is used in place of 'use' in most cases. 'To utilize,' which means to make do with something not normally used for the purpose, is not a synonym of 'to use' with classy cachet --- 'he used the laptop to write the report as his desktop is out of order' and 'he utilised the laptop in the library as a pillow.' The difference is clear.

Fixing and fixation

A report on the decision of a government committee on gas prices caused quite a stir. The report was on the price 'fixation' committee which 'fixated' the prices of gas. One of the seniors at the editors' weekly meeting asked them not to use the word 'fixate' to mean 'fix.' There is the catch.

Modern dictionaries do not list 'fixate' as a verb, they consider 'fixated' an adjective to mean 'unable to stop thinking about something.' The Concise Oxford Dictionary lists 'fixate' as a verb to mean 'direct one's gaze on' or 'to arrest at immature stage, causing abnormal attachment to persons or things,' quite the one the modern dictionaries mean by the adjective 'fixated.'

Although the COD has 'to settle, determine, specify (price, date, place)' as a definition of the verb 'fix,' any fixing is usually a crime, as in 'price fixing allegations against four importers...' or 'price fixing prevention act,' or even 'EU fines in price-fixing cases can run as high as....' Instances are there that 'price fixing' is also used not to mean crimes, as in 'the bill includes an agency or distribution agreement, but does not include a price fixing agreement.' When in doubt if fixing prices hints at a crime, in meaning, there is one way out --- 'the government has set the gas price at... .'

But what about 'fixation?' The COD says it could mean fixing, being fixed, coagulation, act or process of being fixated and (popularly) obsession. Modern dictionaries say it means 'an inability to stop thinking about something or someone, or an unnaturally strong interest in them.' If fixation could mean fixing or being fixed, which also has a meaning of specifying prices, it could be used in that sense, although such instances are rare outside the Indian subcontinent. In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, the word 'fixation' to mean 'setting (the prices)' is in wide use: milk price fixation committee, fare fixation committee, minimum wages fixation commiittee, etc. The 'fixation' has been used in a Western Australian legislation: Wheat Products (Prices Fixation) Act 1938. Note the plural 'prices.'

A gas price committee or a committee on gas prices could have been used, if the people invovled with the committees and the journalists covering the news had not been fixated on the use of 'fixation.'