Another beautifully crafted sentence
from my favourite Nigerian paper's op-ed page today:
"Whatever fog Chief Joshua Dariye was about to conjure to obfuscate the import of the return of seized funds from the erstwhile governor of Plateau State, the clarification from the British authorities has indeed given insight into issues involved as a matter of investigation."
Where to start? Are we to assume that Dariye and the 'erstwhile governor' are one and the same person, or not? Or should we just send the writer on a basic writing course instead? Answers on a postcard please.
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14 comments:
Oh my..Obsufucate?? In what world exactly doe this guy live??
You're right, Jeremy. Lots of newspaper editors and reporters really need to be sent off to basic writing courses. Sometimes, I read these dailies and their abuse of grammar is so rampant that I wouldn't be able to go on reading!
nah......can't understand it either :(
I haven't got a clue
From the sentence, they are two different people, Dariye is the one "obsufucating" the import of funds, while the person trying to import the funds is the "erstwhile" governor. That is exactly what the sentence implies! hehehehehehehe.
Uh, excuse me- this journalist HAS obviously taken a writing course. "Fog", "conjure","obfuscate(?!)", "clarification" ,"insight", even "investigation"? The man found a metaphor and ran with it. So WHAT if it doesnt make sense?Pure poetry. And usually, if its one of our (to borrow a word) erstwhile dailies, pure fiction.
Na wa for big, big grammar. A lot of the newspaper output is unreadable. Some repeated misuse of language is puzzling, like "a whooping N200m".
BTW love the blog, the range of content is superb.
Sorry, what I meant to say was "a whooping N628m"...
...stinkingly rich, international countries. where do it all end?
HUH!!???!!! 'OBSU-GINI'? I can't get past the first line. Still trying to figure out what that means. WHERE THE HELL IS MY DICTIONARY WHEN i NEED IT?
I remember reading Chimamanda somewhere saying "My people never buy when they can purchase" and I thought she hit the nail on the head
Hilarious! I miss having access to Naija papers, they serve better for an old-fashioned belly laugh than any comedy on TV.
I think someone should create a BBC show focusing on Nigerian Journalism - comedy gold.
I may be wrong, but if Great Britain and the United States are somehow destroyed (Please, abeg, FBI, this is a hypothetical situation, dont swarm and shut down my computer), wont Nigeria be the last most populous English, ahem "English"-speaking nation on the earth? Frightening stuff, altho really wont we then have the last laugh on colonialism?
fire the editor
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