OF EDITORIAL MISHAPS, SCHOOLS AND PRINCIPALS

The English language can play cruel mind games, especially for media practitioners. One may set out to innocently state something, only to end up being guilty of implying other non-intended things. The only way to avoid sounding ridiculous, like lumping schools and principals together, is to be extra keen.

Notice how the editor of this leading Kenyan daily, inadvertently perhaps, ended up putting a lot of nonsense on the paper's front page.

"Mary Hill Girls, Sacho and other principals share inside story of their winning formula."

This in essence, means the principals of schools were the ones sharing their winning formula. But for those in the know, there is no principal going by the name 'Mary Hill Girls' or 'Sacho'. These are obviously schools.

So the right order of words in that ' weird newspaper' sentence should have been:

"Principals of Mary Hill Girls, Sacho and other schools share inside story of their winning formula."

Clearly, design considerations in newspaper layouts, must never result in the sacrifice of communication aspects, to the point of entirely changing the intended meaning, (if at all there was any meaningful 'meaning' in the above example).

But unlike the variations of meaning in language, a mathematically calculated element, can hardly be expected to be open to diverse interpretations.

That's why I can confidently say the distance between the Kenyan capital, Nairobi and the Japanese mega city of Tokyo, cannot and will never be less than that between the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, and any other corner of that country.

Keep the Khartoum-Darfur distance to yourself, Mr newspaper editor!