WHAT?are these radio personalities on? Egotism, egocentrism? Paralogism, parallax? Paraffin, paracetamol? Whatever the obsession or absorption, they should dilute the dosage. It might keep them away from their self-centredness and undull their sensitivities.
Every day the eardrums are subjected to the radio ruckus of the quasi-pious and the pompous; the cavalier and the cruel; the language ill-users and the unapologetic; the not all good, the bad and the ugly.
There ought to be a cap on the decibels allowed from any one Holy Ghost preacher on radio at night. I never envisaged the Master Jesus as a loud and garrulous person shouting his message of love at people.
Compassion and noise are not even distant cousins. They are not neighbours either; they are veritable strangers.
Yet pastor after pastor every single week, piercing the night’s calm, rants and raves, paradoxically, about a gentle Jesus.
I have no doubt our Saviour was kind and good – except to a cabal of Pharisees and Sadducees, and lesser doubt that He would have been kinder to a sinner like me.
There is really no need for this deafening, overexuberant, hellfire preaching on radio at night.
My generation and the next need not be subjected to the public exposure of our sinfulness and worthlessness by one who has obviously mastered the art of not transgressing, and has come into possession of a reserved, irreversible and untransferable ticket to Heaven.
Radio listeners should be permitted to repose in slumber at night peacefully. What is the Society For A Quieter Barbados doing about this bombardment of our souls?
God called the light “day”, and the darkness He called “night”. And there was evening, and there was morning . . . . (Genesis 1:5)
In local radio – with rare exception – night and day are pretty much the same. At best, the evenings before are about pronounced pomposity; the mornings after, pompous mispronunciations.
There was a time when, in The Garden Of Peace, the cor-TAGE would leave for Westbury Cemetery every day. Thank God, after innumerable cryptic messages from me – and probably the departed – a certain personage deigned to twist his tongue to cor-TEDGE.
And may his tongue remain twisted.
There is too much self-opinionated yapping on morning radio. If programme hosts, or deejays, or whatever they may be, feel to disgorge themselves of their innermost disappointments with life, one specific morning a week should do.
Once we know in advance what morning it is, then we can go jogging, or turn to a CD of Desmond Weekes, Gabby, Bag, Emile Straker or Harry Belafonte – or a CD of ourselves, if we have any.
Sometime ago, someone green and quite untried, forcing an image of maturity and erudition, sought to inform readers of a new word each day. He had neither the panache nor knowledge of Maurice Norville, but kept pretending possession.
His word for the day was an emphatic hyper-BOWL. I never sent him the note of correction that it was hy-PURR-BULLY. I was afraid I might have been accused of questioning his sexual orientation.
Someone else a morning more recently introduced to listeners another bomb. With bravado he gave us ab-STEM-ME-US. Foolish me! And all along, like you, I thought it was ab-STEE-ME-YUS.
These wordsmits (people who unabashedly smite the English language and receive pay for it) should be kept as far away as possible from the airwaves. Their banishment should be a prerequisite for an annual radio licence.
It is too often and too long lost on the powers that be that the way presenters on radio – and television – speak influences the elocution of others.
Right here in the NATION offices has been the argument over the pronunciation of the herb basil. One fellow insisted it was BAY-sil, obviously impressed by some CNN mis-announcer.
It is simply BAH-zil. And why am I surprised that I didn’t hear of BUH-zil?
Hey, I will not, like an acquaintance of mine, be sidetrackted!
