Arrogance without foundation is a manifestation of profound and chronic ignorance.
MORE?AND?MORE?PEOPLE are fancying themselves? the critic. They care not for T.S. Eliot’s observation that a critic must be genuinely very intelligent.
There is this brigade of buffoons who, on assuming they are part of this country’s intelligentsia, have taken criticism to a fresh low – the bowels of the earth.
The weblogs, chat rooms, Messenger, Twitter, Facebook will be the doom of us all if these shallow language brigands are allowed to inflict unabashedly on us their daily uninformed knowledge chaos.
Regrettably, on these new media, the horde of mavericks keep hoisting upon their heads and shoulders a responsibility they are unable and unfit to carry.
Driven by a misplaced expectancy of influence with their freedom of expression and assumption of an authority of language communication, which they certainly do not possess, they gird their loins with a passion towards correcting and hopefully shaming the professional.
These enemies of the English language pounce with haste, seeking to strangle those of us who have a much healthier appreciation for and understanding of the tongue, who they think have slipped up. Theirs is a criticism that is caustic, condescending – and dead wrong.
I will concede that among professionals some things do sometimes go wrong. Howlers are a professional’s nightmare; but that is no reason for the uninitiated and unknowledgeable to take potshots.
I was amazed sometime ago by the number of people who had never seen or heard of the word “doning”, or the phrases in which it appears: blood doning, organ doning, sperm doning and the like. I am even more flabbergasted now that the critics could bungle so badly on “just deserts”.
Once again, the critics and their clan have been poking fun at the newspaper headline, denigrating its writer – when he is absolutely correct.
Said one: “That’s what happens when you get dessert in the desert . . . .”
Another: “Oba get Millennium Heights, Ri-Ri get Apes Hill, now Jalon get a whole desert? I should have played more sports . . . . Wait . . . . “Deserts”. Um is more dan one he get?”
Someone tried to explain the sports page headline was correct; that the phrase had nothing to do with dry land or indeed sweets at the end of a meal. But to little avail.
“And to think this was fool-read . . . . I mean proofread before production . . . . I mean publication!!!!” said another.
“Just deserts” is exactly what one deserves; which might be the best of all desserts. But neither the twain shall be the same. The confusion comes from inadequate reading.
This aliterate state which too many of us have fallen headlong into has been encouraged by television and the BlackBerry. Everything is flash and fluff – in short form.
CNN and Fox News boast of experts in economics, recessions, doomsdays, right down to psychosomatic feelings of relief in jones-ing. A man gets killed by a pipe gun, and CNN will find a guru to comment on the efficacy or lack thereof of combustion in a galvanized tube.
The experts will be flamboyant – almost like Rosemary Alleyne, but not as deep. They are going to be repetitive in their shallowness – short of real substance.
Thank God, BBC hasn’t quite gone under.
Few are the viewers and listeners who are being encouraged to think beyond the headline news and Admiral Nelson’s interpretation or rejection of it.
My irate friend Desmond Johnson doesn’t get it right every time, but you have to give him credit for challenging his call-in listeners to think beyond the salutation, the rumoured titbit, the first paragraph.
If people think, they might want to read. If people read at length, they might want to check – they might not be too lazy to leaf through the dictionary. They will digest knowledge.
If they have knowledge, they will recognize the difference between dessert, desert and deserts.
Of course, we cannot know everything at once; for knowledge is a journey, along which we indulge in constant reading – for the soul as for the mind. Without knowledge it’s a tangled web we weave.
Ridley Greene is a Caribbean multi-award-winning journalist. Email ridleygreene@nationnews.com
