Most popular mangled expressions in Nigerian English (I)
In native varieties of the English language, some mangled expressions have become so popular and so widely used that they have acquired sufficient social prestige to constitute new standards. Examples are “first off” (which is the mangled form of “first of all”), “most everyone” (which is the distorted form of “almost everyone”), “out the window” […]
In native varieties of the English language, some mangled expressions have become so popular and so widely used that they have acquired sufficient social prestige to constitute new standards. Examples are “first off” (which is the mangled form of “first of all”), “most everyone” (which is the distorted form of “almost everyone”), “out the window” (where the preposition “of” is dispensed with), etc.
It’s not only lexical properties of expressions that are the victims of mangling; popular sayings and aphorisms are also routinely distorted by native speakers. For instance, the popular expression “blood, sweat and tears” is actually a distortion of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speech to the British nation. His exact words are: “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” is a distortion of “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Similarly, the expression “there is method in my madness” is a misquotation of a passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Polonius observes: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Likewise, the expression “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” is a misquotation of British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s line in Ancient Mariner. In it he writes: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
But we have all got used to these misquotations—or are not even consciousness of them in the first place—because they are committed by the most educated people in the English-speaking world, and have been passed down to us. So we in Nigeria are only adding to a list that is already too long, except that we do not enjoy the same privilege as native speakers of the English in having our own mutilations conferred respectability over time. Our deviations are forever condemned to being socially stigmatized as aberrant because we lack the cultural and social capital of native speakers of the language. My object in pointing out the following popular mangled expressions in Nigerian English is not to ridicule them but to simply call attention to them.
1. “Be rest assured.” The fixed English idiom that this Nigerian English expression apes is “rest assured.” It means to be certain. But it is rare in Nigerian English for the expression to be rendered without the pointless and intrusive “be.” The following sentence is an example of how this phrase regularly occurs in popular Nigerian English: “You should BE rest assured that I will not disappoint you.” The “be” in the phrase is superfluous. Native speakers of the English language don’t include it.
I can’t locate the source of this distortion, except to point out that what grammarians call the habitual, uninflected “be” (that is, where the verb “to be” doesn’t change form under any circumstance) occurs a lot in Nigerian Pidgin English (such as in the expression “I be don see am today,” i.e., “I have seen him today”), in African-American Vernacular English (such as in the expression “she be mean to me,” i.e., “she is mean to me”) and in many English-based pidgins and creoles. I am tempted to argue that the addition of “be” before the idiom “rest assured” in Nigerian English is attributable to the influence of Nigerian Pidgin English.
2. “I appreciate.” When I lived in Nigeria, this expression was not part of the repertoire of popular speech. Its widespread use in contemporary Nigerian English must be the result of the relentless cross-border linguistic flows that the Internet has enabled. The phrase is clearly a poor mimicry of “I appreciate it,” the alternative expression for “thank you” in America, Canada, Britain, and other native-speaker linguistic climes. Without the addition of “it,” “this,” or “that,” the phrase can only mean that the speaker or writer habitually shows appreciation but for nothing in particular; it does not convey the sense that he or she is thankful or grateful for a specific thing. The first time someone said “I appreciate” to me in Nigeria, I couldn’t resist asking “you appreciate what?” As you can probably tell, that expression drives me crazy!
3. “To be at the safer side.” The Standard English idiom that this expression distorts is “to be on the safe side.” It means to be cautious or safe—or to err on the side of safety or caution. This seems to me like a sloppy distortion because it violates two basic grammatical rules. First, “on” is the preposition that almost always co-occurs with the noun “side” when it signifies location. Second, the word “safer” is a comparative adjective, and comparative adjectives are used only when two things are being compared. Plus, comparative adjectives always co-occur with the conjunction “than,” except in situations where the comparison is apparent.
4. “He is in soup.” The standard rendering of this idiom is “in the soup.” Without the definite article “the,” the expression would mean something other than its conventional idiomatic meaning, that is, in trouble or experiencing difficulty. “He is in soup” could mean that someone has literally fallen into a pot of soup. One of the characteristics of idioms is that their grammatical properties are often fixed and unchangeable. This quality is called grammatical fixity, as I’ve pointed out many times here.
Nigerian newspapers are clearly to blame for the mangling of this idiom. One of the rules of (daily) newspaper headline writing is that articles (i.e., the words “the,” “a,” and “an”) should always be dispensed with. In line with this rule, copyeditors in Nigerian newspapers cast headlines about people being “in soup,” which is perfectly legitimate. The problem is that the general populace has now adopted and internalized this “headlinese” as if it were conventional, everyday English.
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