[ad_1]
Mourning Philip Ochieng
I am indescribably dispirited by the fall of a linguistic guru, one of the few unapologetic warriors and defenders of proper language. He missed no opportunity to whip those who, either by poor schooling or rushed communication punctured or deflated Good English. Ochieng was an assiduous advocate for unimpeachable fluency whose lexicographic brawn was of iconographic proportions. His candor was as admirable as his linguistic cogency. He disavowed egregious deportment and often pilloried those displaying it. He wielded a blade that spared none since he neither pandered nor capitulated to anybody.
As an idiosyncratic linguist, his celebrated column carried by a local daily was the first stop for throngs who adored his lordly language and eclectic rendering. Lazybones termed his style gratuitous, even superfluous. But the linguistically regal Ochieng had neither the time nor forbearance for the fatuous. He was pertinacious and obdurate. Sanctimonious Nyayo era dissidents pejoratively admonished him for perfidy. His rebuttal? The vociferous crusaders register token success. His legions find him equanimous and admirably sanguine; a sagacious and perspicacious pro-democracy general cognizant of the reality that the battlefield strategy must necessarily be multifarious.
His exit leaves an
interstice that is tough to bridge. In a way, it is indicative of the
journalistic degradation presently on course. Guardians of the trade who
shunned the ephemeral in both language and content have either rose to higher
light or are too old to lend a hand. It is a lugubrious moment for the fallen
soldiers and the state of writing as a craft.
In the pulchritudinous, resplendent, and delightful words of George Elliot, “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” Unto you, the whizz and buff of exquisite language, we owe remembrance.
I wish upon his kin the
Creator’s solace. May the Linguistic Greats, Shakespeare and Sophocles,
Euripides and Aristophanes, Emerson, and Wordsworth, welcome this great Kenyan
to the High Table of Linguistic Purity.
Onchari Oyieyo April 30,
2021.
Related
[ad_2]
Source link
