The police are always plural, keep it that way

Loreto Kiambu Girls High School students read the Nation on March 18, 2018. English is a Germanic language at base. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • But, in your struggle to tame your language of work completely, please do not forget that England’s is a language of ordinary human beings.
  • The secret, then, is to make yourself the master (or the “mistress”) of all the theoretical rules that govern every nook and cranny of England’s tongue.

A newspaper should play the leading role in the language it chooses for its work.

Moreover, a columnist should be trusted for the mastery of the topic on which he or she writes. It is embarrassing that Kenya’s English-language newspapers regularly use the word police singularly.

In a country like Kenya, where English is not the mother tongue of newspaper employees, a sub-editor cannot always be trusted to prevent embarrassing words and ideas from entering his or her newspaper.

For neither he nor she is responsible for any particular page. I know this because for many decades I worked in English-language newsrooms in many world cities.

I worked as chief sub-editor and often as editor-in-chief of dailies or weeklies in Berlin, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Nairobi and Rome.

PLURAL

One of the problems is that, advisedly, Nairobi’s Nation publications frequently use the word police to describe a plurality of human beings and their equipment.

Indeed, because the police are always a plural concept, the noun police should always take a plural verb.

For instance, instead of “the police is…”, you must say: “the police are…” Yet, recently, the Nation used the noun police singularly, namely, with the verb “is”.

On the same day, but on a different page, it used the correct plural verb: “Police have abandoned us, say traders…” My only complaint on that occasion was that the article “the” was missing from the noun police.

For such a situation, sub-editors should keep the article the in mind all the time because the term “the police”, though formally singular, refers to a plurality of human beings and, therefore, always requires a plural verb.

BLAME

In short, in conception and as an institution, the term the police is always plural. This should be good news for our daily newspaper headline writers, namely, the sub-editors.

For, in their admittedly sensitive work, whenever any one of them goofs it up, the blame can then go to the entire plurality of them, rather than to any individual sub-editor.

But, in your struggle to tame your language of work completely, please do not forget that England’s is a language of ordinary human beings.

In fundament, therefore, English is like the language of every other human society the whole world over.

EXPERT

The secret, then, is to make yourself the master (or the “mistress”) of all the theoretical rules that govern every nook and cranny of England’s tongue.

Of course, it may help if you know that English is a Germanic language at base, even with the Mediterranean Latin-and-Greek superstructure which has more recently imposed itself upon England’s language that makes life so difficult for its learners the whole world over, indeed, even for many of those whose mother tongue it is.

Dholuo, my own Nilotic mother tongue, simply does not have such a problem because the leading classes of Dholuo speakers never colonised any societies too far away from home or as conceitedly as the Englanders have recently colonised human societies the whole world over.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist