Mrs. Jill Davies was my English teacher in Form One and for most of my high school years. She was a quintessential English school ma’am, insisting on being addressed in correct English and with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed in the essays that you handed over to her. English under her tutelage was fascinating because she had the clipped British accent that was so enthralling to the young boys that we were.
Those of us who had completed our primary level education in Nairobi or any of the other large towns in Kenya or at any of the few private primary schools back then were lucky in that our English was by and large quite refined. It was quite another story for those who had attended primary school in the more rural areas tongues heavy with the dialect of the part of Kenya they came from and English as a second language taught only in classrooms and with no real reason to put what you were taught into regular practice.
Jill Davies’s accent was to these guys (and with all due respect to anyone who was similarly afflicted) a real challenge to keep up with and many would stare mesmerized at Mrs. Davies as she prattled along, not understanding a word she said but nodding their heads whenever those who could make out what she was saying did so, and then being caught off guard as she would fire off a question directed at one of the head nodding boys who would then nod back to her unable to comprehend that a question was being directed at him. The fumbling, mumbling and obvious confusion would send the rest of the class into a paroxysm of laughter often resulting in someone being punished to kneel at a corner or a quick rap with a ruler on their knuckles.
The experience with Mrs. Davies however by and large ensured that we would all become fairly conversant in our spoken and written English once done with high school something that I am eternally grateful for today. I am able to construct a semblance of a sentence and string together several sentences to make a paragraph and I still enjoy reading and have a stock of novels both bound and online that I treasure immensely.
However, in this digital age of the internet, auto correct, online dictionaries, websites dedicated to helping people communicate better and social media I get quite disappointed at the quality of the written word. Hasty contractions and abbreviations, poor sentence construction, no due regard to capitalization of proper nouns, no pagination, apostrophes and exclamation marks taken for granted and used anyhowly!!!! Question marks where none is required? Silly speling errors……..the list is endless and Jill Davies would be beetroot red hopping mad if she discovered who was responsible for this massacre of the queen’s language.
Truly the language of English has been stretched, pulled, pulverized and convoluted so badly over the years that in the process we have been reduced to being poor communicators both in our personal and business lives content with struggling to read incomprehensible gibberish, shortened for convenience sake and to save a few shillings on an SMS and in a combination of English, Swahili, sheng and our mother tongue. It’s no wonder that the comic relief provided by the poor English speaker is one of the most hilarious things one is likely to encounter anywhere in Kenya today including in our hallowed precincts of Parliament and in positions of responsibility and power!!
I do not claim to be the best in this English thing or anything else but do take the trouble to check what you have typed before hitting that send, print or share button because now more than ever before spell prompt and predictive text has also added new unseen and hidden dangers to the typing of a letter, email message or SMS because it predicts what you want to write and populates (or is it pollutes) it even before you have had a chance to figure out what you wanted to say!!
NB - Read also my earlier blog on this link on a similar subject http://www.joe-wonderingallowed.blogspot.com/2012/01/and-you-wonder-why-they-speak-funny.html
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