My new year resolutions
A friend phoned me in the first week of January 2016. He was telling me that he had been involved in a “fatal” road accident during the festive season. He was thankful that he survived the fatal “accident”. In my field of work, we do not refer to such occurences as “accidents” rather , events or crashes. In any case, I was not ready to engage in a disagreement or call it argument with an individual who I should be thankful also that he has survived. Where was the accident? He tells me the location of the accident. I am sorry to hear about it. Who else was in the car with you? He tells me that he had been alone. Thank goodness. Was another vehicle involved? He reassures me that it was a single vehicle accident, i.e. it was just his vehicle that was involved. Were there any pedestrians involved? I know that in this country, pedestrians and bicyclists are at great danger in “fatal” accidents. My friend says that no pedestrian was involved. I become more expectant as I wonder whether someone off the road such as a farmer in a garden was hit. What happened? My friend says that the vehicle overturned multiple times but managed to rest on a river bank. I am sorry. I say this once again. “I can tell you,” he continues, “it was a serious ‘fatal’ accident.” Upon which I ask him. Who died? “No one died in fact,” he continues. “That is the lucky part.”
I am left with nothing to say. In fatal accidents, people die. You can’t have a fatal accident where no one loses their life. Not that I would have loved someone to have died from this accident. No. In fact I was more than relieved that there was no soul lost. But when people say “fatal”, it means “deadly”. Fatal accidents are not just serious accidents. They are more than serious. A life has been lost. In the new year, I would want to try to say one thing and mean the same thing that I have said. I do not wish to say one thing and yet mean something different.
Every year, I learn new spellings and new grammar (English). It is this effort that helps me learn that we should never write nor say “renumeration”. There is nothing like that in English. There is remuneration, of course. The same is the fascination with “of” as people erroneously and innocently say “comprised of” or “comprising of”. There is nothing like that in the English language. There is just comprising a, b and c, or comprise a, b and c. What I find as a challenge is what do you do to an individual who says this wrong English and you wish they were correct? Do you buy for them the small book “Common mistakes in English” or you repeat what they have just erroneously said but now correctly and you hope thy will know the difference? The problem may be that they may be thinking that it is you who is wrong. n
