Linguistic Fatalities

The headline on Al Jazeera said “Death Toll Mounts in Cameroon’s Linguistic Unrest”.

I can’t even.

Disclaimer, because no one, anywhere has any sense of human decency, humor, irony, or even a basic absurdity detector: It is, of course, a terrible, terrible thing whenever anyone dies, at any time, anywhere, for any reason, or under any kind of particular circumstances, at all, ever.

I probably need to say more there, because some people (i.e., those who lack the qualities mentioned above) can never think or hear about death unless the words are surrounded by the deepest sacred solemnity, after which all must be exhorted to send those thoughts and prayers to the violent angry god, apparently because He loves hearing about how sad His people feel.

Boring! So let’s assume I said all of those deep, sacred, solemn, sorrowful things, and move on.

And afterwards…

“Death toll mounts in linguistic unrest”. Well of course it does; it wouldn’t be much of a toll if it stopped at one, would it? Nonetheless, I am completely sympathetic to “linguistic unrest”, in that I always feel unrestful myself whenever I see someone use an apostrophe in the third-person singular neuter possessive pronoun. Maybe we just need a simpler expression for that, to make it easier for those people to remember. It’s its! It’s its! It isn’t even difficult; none of the little possessive pronouns includes an apostrophe: his, hers, yours, mine, ours, theirs, whose and its. Nary an apostrophe there.

Ah, but no, it’s not about my issue (it so rarely is), but about which language should be used, French or English. So the Cameroon problem is like Quebec v Canada, but on a smaller scale. Of course, it’s not a “small” problem for the people living in it (Disclaimers abound!), but the fact that it includes a death toll seems a bit extreme. People do seem to be fighting and killing over very small issues everywhere these days, while major problems remain unaddressed. Spengler, in The Decline of the West, said that this would be our “warring states” period, and that there isn’t much we can do about it, either to prevent it or to stop it once it starts. In the midst of it now, I find it all so exhausting.

And the actual death toll? 17 (seventeen). This is what counts for international news these days. And this is also why we cannot stop the “warring states” era: the current population of humans includes people who say “My language is better than yours, and I will kill you before I learn to be bilingual.” The media is giving us an opportunity here to point at others and feel superior to them. (Thanks, media!) But are we really any better than that? We pipe poison into people’s homes and call it “drinking water”, and expect them to pay for it, because doing it that way makes bigger profit$, and it would be expen$ive to provide the real thing. And oh, that list would go on and on…

At the same time, if I could I definitely would impose a harsh penalty on those who leave their apostrophes lying around in words that don’t actually call for them—probably by removing their apostrophe-privileges, up to and including a lifetime ban. But that’s just me.