Language on parade

HELLO, members of ALAN: finally, GEJ has done it! In the evening of Tuesday, May 14, 2013, in a derring-do defiance of calls to the contrary by some opposition parties, our President, instead of digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole called Amnesty for Boko Haram, took the bull by the horn by deciding to keep insurgency at BAY. As a regular rider on the language train and, ipso facto, a member of ALAN, you must have discerned the linguistic creature that is on parade, today.

You’re damn right: It is idioms, with special regard to the one that graces our title today. In a sense, idioms are like their first cousin, proverbs, which Chinua Achebe aptly describes as “the palm oil with which words are eaten.”  Just what will language be without proverbs and idioms!

Already, you we have been served three idiomatic expressions, the third of which is a special one that is custom-made for this occasion.  I am referring to the idiom, “keeping insurgency at BAY.” It is special because what we have as the conventional idiomatic expression is keep at bay, in which the letters of the last word, “bay,” are not capitalised, as they are in keeping insurgency at BAY.

The language aficionado that you are, if you listened to the national broadcast in which President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan declared a state of emergency in three northern states last Tuesday, you would readily know that BAY is the acronym for Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe, seemingly the hotbed of Boko Haram: the sect that has wreaked untold havoc on innocent Nigerians for God knows how long, now, bestriding those three states and more like a callous colossus, and behaving as if it held our poor president, allow me to say,  by the balls.

Before BAY, the first acronym that came to my mind, as I heard the president mention the three states in his broadcast, was YAB. But I quickly jettisoned it for two reasons.  First, my snappy search of the two dictionaries that were at my disposal made me discover that “yab” is not a conventional or common English word. Second, methinks that the “King of Yabbies” himself, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti of living memory, would loath to “yab” our President for his decision to keep insurgency at bay, even though, like many Nigerians, he might query the president for taking such a long time to bite the bullet.

Jettisoning YAB turned out to be the work of providence, so to say, for it instantly drove me to further juggle the three letters to come up with the anagram, BAY. It was that act that made the telling idiom — keep at bay — rush into my mind! The mind, I then mused, is indeed a rendezvous for serendipity of this sort, but only if it is well-nurtured by the juice of language.  And that should be a regular pastime, if not a passionate duty, of any aficionado of language. For, after all, you cannot claim to be a devotee of language, if you do not make delving into its nature in order to nurture your mind with its nutrients a constant preoccupation. That, I dare proclaim, is just what is expected of members of ALAN.

Since I hailed you at the outset of today’s excursion with the salutation, “Hello, members of ALAN,” you must have been wondering, “What the hell is that?”  Well, by virtue of taking a seat on the language train regularly or occasionally, deliberately or accidentally, you are an automatic member of ALAN, acronym for Association of Language Aficionados of Nigeria. Any member of ALAN must see himself or herself as somebody whose passion for language makes him or her eager to learn more and more about this mystical phenomenon all the time, if not for edification, then for pleasure.

Before you finish saying, “Preachy, preachy, how is all that the business of LOP?” Let me quickly return to my safe haven.  The idiom, keep at bay, simply means “to prevent something or someone unpleasant from coming too near you or harming you.”  But its origin is seemingly rather fascinating. As one authoritative source puts it, “Baying is a continuous barking by hounds. To keep something at bay means to prevent its escape by surrounding it with barking dogs, or by extension, to prevent a problem from getting out of control by maintaining constant vigilance.”

The origin of the idiom raises quite a number of interesting questions, but we shall leave you with only one, here, with the assumption that barking dogs are also biting dogs. The question is: Is surrounding BAY with barking dogs equal to surrounding the insurgents in the region, sufficiently?  In plainer words, what is the certainty that the cancer has not spread to other parts of the region, especially, the states adjacent to BAY?

Hmm, let it not be said that the president tried to keep the insurgency at BAY, but could not keep Boko Haram at bay! Surely, all members of ALAN can tell the difference between BAY and bay.  To evoke the lyrics of that popular hit by the late R&B maestro, Otis Redding, we are sitting at the dock of the bay, watching how GEJ’s cookie will crumble. Qui sera, sera!